CORP – Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning
Abstract
Contemporary urban development in Russia differs from that of the Soviet period by the presence of many new actors, the existence of private property and capital influencing development decisions. A new season of public investment in city planning is emerging in Russia. There is an ongoing discussion of creating new master plans. However, how can be designed and proposed these tools useful and efficient? How to characterize them in their strategic and regulatory aspects? Above all, how to make sure that the master plans are truly tailor-made on the problems of the cities and not standardized tools that do not respond to the needs of the local communities? All these open questions call responsible authorities considering different interests in planning and policymaking. The previous system of administrative planning had to be changed to correspond adequately to new conditions. Officially, the current version of the Russian Urban Planning Code requires ‘public discussion’ of any urban development project that should be organised by local authorities. However, the formal evolution of the planning law has found little consequences in practice. Regularlyorganised public discussions remain more rituals than a real planning tool; they have ‘recommendatory nature’ according to the law that allows public administrations to ignore public opinion in their final decisions. The paper represents the results of the one-year experience of the CRISALIDE (EU/Russian Federation financed project through Eranet Rus Plus) project consortium in enhancing public participation in the urban development process. The R&D project, aiming at bringing together technological, social and organizational innovations, uses the area-based approach and experiments within the territory of a brownfield (old airport) in the selected city Rostov-on-Don. The chosen work area attracts notable attention of different local and regional actors due to its size, location, marketing potential and regional significance. Design of a decision support system for this area redevelopment becomes a kind of provocation that helped to involve in thedesign process local experts, activists and policy-makers. Through a series of the organised by the CRISALIDE consortium events, the new collaborations between the local and external actors established and the public discussions of the possible future redevelopment scenarios boosted. Public participation influences the DSS design process and is resulted in the system's goals and methods used that was its main target. At the same time, public discussions at the pre-planning stage is not a common practice in Russia, CRISALIDE proposed and tested a methodology for effectively and efficiently running a participatory planning process capable of grasping the local territorial demand coming from citizens and stakeholders. Moreover, the development of a smart platform, driven by IGis technology, aims at shaping the local decisional environment towards smart design and land use planning
