Interestingly, the two most widely shared links on social media today are Forbes’s excellent investigation, “This Is a Management Failure at the City Level”, about how Moscow’s urban improvement program is being carried out, and Grigory Revzin’s article, “Moscow’s Urban Improvement: We’re Ready to Endure the Whip, but You Can Choke on Your Gingerbread,” in which he praises the program while also admitting that he is paid by it.
For Forbes, it’s all very straightforward: money, contracts, hard facts, addresses.
Revzin, meanwhile, explains to us that we are fools and should listen to him in everything — the great urbanist who, together with other sages who have grasped the essence of urbanism, knows how everything should be done and will force us to accept urban comfort.
We’re building a friendly city for you idiots, so sit quietly and wait until we’re finished. After all, we know how it’s done in New York and in the finest houses of Philadelphia.
Give it a read — it’s quite an interesting debate.
I’ll write about this in more detail later, but for now I can’t help pointing out two things:
I’ve heard all this before. About how Tverskaya needs noble marble. Just a little more marble and — voilà — the friendly city will arrive. City residents will take part in the urban spectacle, just as Revzin describes it.
Greenery will take the comfort of walking along Tverskaya to a whole new level.
Here it is, your urban spectacle:
It has both theater and the apotheosis of urban space.
Each of these damn things cost more than 2 million rubles.
According to calculations by TV Rain (an independent Russian media outlet), planting each bush — and then replacing it regularly — cost close to 8 million rubles. Hundreds of millions of rubles were spent on all this; here is our detailed investigation.
So here’s my position: I am prepared to grant Grigory Revzin, Maxim Liksutov, Sergei Sobyanin, and Pyotr Biryukov the moral right to lecture all of us about urbanism and the friendly city only after they buy this “marble luxury of the post-industrial city” back from Moscow at the purchase price and install it at their own dachas (country houses). To stage their “urban spectacle.”
Until then, they should refrain from writing such arrogant articles about city residents as if they were animals.
As for “how they do it in New York, Paris, and Milan,” it is also worth starting with the fact that in neither New York nor London would the existence of a firm like Strelka KB, with four partners — one of them the very same Grigory Revzin — be plausible if it were receiving city contracts worth 1,812,664,431.23 rubles through an outright corrupt procedure.
Why them? Why is the city paying them 1.8 billion rubles, and how much does each partner of Strelka KB receive, including the esteemed Grigory Revzin? This is public money, so presumably we have a right to know.
Let that be our part in the “urban spectacle.”