An Urban Crisis of a Financial Model: The Adaptive Reuse of Socialist Industrial Complexes in Moscow

Abstract

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has transformed from a socialist state and communist ideology into a democratic state and a post industrial economy. The dramatic transformation of a society generated a concurrent transformation of the urban fabric. A transformation informed and sculpted by extremes; such as the sudden absence of an established social system and the application of a paradoxical one and the aspirations of a market economy which must struggle through the hindrances of a socialist past. Consequently, the physical transformation of Moscow, has been, and is sculpted by the extremes of the post-socialist vision of capitalism; which is fuelled by seventy years of repressed economic energy, an energy which compresses economic evolution. Compression distils out and eliminates critical processes required to reconcile economic and social potential that is essential for the liveability of the city. Instead, through the haste to transform, it allows uninformed preconceptions to flourish; preconceptions which ignore the evident and essential needs of a city. In this case, compression has allowed the potential, of urban transformation, to dissolve into a hybrid of economic equivocation and ambition. In Moscow, this hybrid has been imbued into the mechanics of the privatization of property, government management of land use and the priority placed on private developer interests. These private interests, lacking proper regulation, are characterized by; additional burden to the cities overloaded and failing infrastructure, the focus on short term profit at the expense of long term progress and the damage to the fabric of existing neighbourhoods through large scale insular developments. Through the lens of previously state held industrial complexes and their adaptive reuse this paper examines the transforming notion of public space, local identity and city life in the Post-Socialist City of Moscow.