Urban Routines at the Strelka Institute

The traditional view of urban space through the prism of statistics is incapable of grasping all the complexities of the processes and phenomena of the megalopolis.  Its data are often self-contradictory and fail to take into account many phenomena that are important in the daily lives of the citizens, their habits and perspectives of the city.  Without ignoring the figures, students of the Strelka Institute set out, over a nine month period, to rethink the routine practices of Moscow’s inhabitants; how they work, live, make purchases and move around town.  In their research, the students focused not on the generally known facts, but on new, little-noticed, and as-yet unresolved contradictions.  Work on the research projects was carried out in the context of five studios: Cars, Retail, Dwelling, Offices, and the studio Links - dedicated to the city’s informal economy.

The educational program’s final exhibition is based on the results of this work and constitutes the utterance of Strelka’s students on the theme of daily routine in Moscow, taking the format of a newspaper – that most everyday form of communicative media.

The pavilion holding the students’ exhibition is made up of three sections.  The first part, the entrance lobby, provides a general view of the urban routines theme and permits visitors to acquaint themselves with the basic archetypes peculiar to Moscow.  This is a cube-shaped space, on the walls of which recognizable portraits of townsfolk have been graphically depicted (“the Motorist,” “the Metro Flower-Seller,” “the Tramp” and so on) alongside brief descriptions of each character.  One of the walls also shows the statistics for the most standard urban phenomena: the size of traffic jams, and the scale of office, retail and residential space in the city.  In this way, the visitor begins to immerse himself in the everyday routine.

The main part of the exhibition is a rectangular room whose walls are hung with newspaper-posters in two languages: Russian and English.  Each newspaper reveals one of the student projects.  Strelka student Pavel Ilyichov, for example, has used his broadsheet to discuss his research topic on the theme of shopping centers.  “Malls: Quality or Quantity?” he asks in his headline.  The shopping center remains a convenient place for making purchases but, in 2016, new shopping complexes appear in Moscow, bringing new competition to the market.  The fundamental conclusion of his observations is that the most visited centers are not always the ones with the best quality.  Consumers, meanwhile, continue to become more demanding.

Student Elya Mazina investigated Moscow’s garage spaces.  Her newspaper – “Your 20 m² of freedom in the city” – looks into the additional possibilities garages may hold, suggesting their use as dwelling space.
 
“The United Courtyards Organisation” is the headline for student Nicholas Moore’s broadsheet on Moscow’s courtyards.  These spaces take up 55% of the city’s area and have potential for transformation into landscaped urban attractions.

Other themes touched upon include: a suggestion for the transferal of business centers to the Moscow periphery, an overview of the city as seen exclusively from the Metro system, as well as projects for the integration of office attributes into urban space.
 
In the center of this section of the exhibition, a structure has been installed containing drawers into which the students have placed various objects, creatively expanding on the themes of the newspaper-posters, such as:  A booklet on the beauty of Moscow courtyards, a selection of business cards from participants in the informal economy, a model of the Metro system, and a children’s construction set serving as a metaphor for Muscovites’ garages.

Finally, the concluding section of the exhibition – a reading area – contains a large selection of slides produced by the students for presentations made in the course of the academic year.  Here, visitors are invited to browse through books on urbanistics published by Strelka Press.
 
The “Urban Routines” exhibition is the material result of the joint work of the students and the Strelka Institute, oriented on youth education and increasing the quality of life in cities.  The students’ ideas may subsequently become part of real projects, part of which may reach implementation via the Institute’s consulting division – KB Strelka.
 
All in all, the exhibition gives a glimpse of a youthful, informal, future-oriented and simultaneously unexpected view of the city and its elements.  It is possible that these ideas may become the departure point for the emergence of new tendencies, to define the image of Moscow and other major Russian cities in years to come.