Sunday, October 11, 2009

Some general commentary about October 10

As ever, I highlight efforts made by opponents of the Gazprom skyscraper project because their voices tend to be dismissed as backward and ignorant within Russia, and are barely if ever heard outside of Russia. Whether or not a person supports the construction of a 400-meter building within sight of the St. Petersburg city center, a fair evaluation of the entire situation demands recognition of the valid comments raised by those who do not support that construction.

However, there are certainly voices raised in support of the skyscraper. On comment forums for all the news outlets quoted in the post just below, at least 1-2 comments expressed support for the project. On September 29, Nevastroyka ran an article quoting several of “the most talented Petersburgers” who support “Okhta Center”: radio and TV host Sergei Stillavin, businessman Oleg Tinkov, media figure Dmitrii Puchkov, Vice-President of the Russian Union of Architects Aleksei Vorontsov, science fiction writer Boris Strugatskii, and web designer Artemii Lebedev (whose blog, asserts the article, is read by over 100,000 people every day). In general, these supporters see the Gazprom project as bringing money, dynamism and excitement to a city with a decaying infrastructure and little economic power.

The comments of such supporters usually assume that opponents of the skyscraper dislike the height or architectural style above all; for this reason, they often claim that the opponents want to live in the past and deny Petersburg a vital, prosperous future. This aspect of the divide between the skyscraper’s supporters and opponents is interesting – probably more complex than just “new growth vs. nostalgia” or “future vs. past,” but in some ways suggesting a difference in temperament. As the magazine Ekspert pointed out about the demonstration in March 2007, and as the Delovoi Peterburg reported pointed out this past Saturday, opposition to the Gazprom tower is not limited to unsuccessful people trying to live in a lost Soviet past. However, Gazprom supporters tend to label them that way.

Previous posts here have emphasized a point that sometimes gets lost in this depiction: opposition to the skyscraper is not based solely on the building’s height or on its architectural design. The chief (although not very sexy) problem lies in the project’s detrimental effect on the new system of building codes and procedures – a system that represents the hard work of Petersburg’s planning community as well as the public participation of residents from all over the city.

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