August 2016: demolition of an illegally constructed trade pavilion next to Moscow metro station 1905 Street. (c) Maxim Blinov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
This text originally appeared in Raznoglasiya, a Colta.ru project.
In Russia, urban space only became a real subject of public discussion comparatively recently. This happened at the start of the decade, when key elements in Russia’s urbanism debate — the Strelka Institute, The Village online platform, bloggers Ilya Varlamov and Maksim Katz with their “Urban projects”, the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, the Moscow Urban Planning Forum, the “Do It Yourself” Festival and the Partizaning urban re-planning movement, and other media and institutions after them — introduced the uninitiated but fashion-conscious reader to the unfamiliar concepts of “urban planning”, “urban planners” and “urban environment”.
