Following the wildly popular transformation of Gorky Park from rusting funfair to Wi-Fi heaven, Muscovites finally felt as if their city was becoming liveable. But with more gentrifying projects on the cards, is it just a way to silence dissent?

Damien Hirst and David LaChapelle artworks adorn the raw concrete walls. Flair bartenders serve up gem-coloured cocktails. A rotation of Michelin-starred chefs flown in from around the world curate new menus each week.

This is Door 19, a pop-up restaurant in a penthouse apartment in Moscow that this year played host to the city’s oligarchs and hipsters alike. In case you’re interested, and have a spare $18m to blow, the penthouse is for sale, along with several other apartments in the ArtHouse building, for between $15,000 and $20,000 per square metre. Door 19 is both an extravagant plug for the flats but also for a much loftier vision: ArtKvartal, a 510-hectare creative neighbourhood that wouldn’t be out of place in London, Berlin or New York.

The plan is an ambitious one, not least because of the hefty investment required to transform the proposed industrial area along the right bank of the Yauza River around Baumanskaya Metro into a neighbourhood with cafes, bars, restaurants and a sense of community – something that Moscow currently lacks.

At its heart is the desire to develop an artistic quarter with work spaces, apartments, pedestrianised lanes and cycle paths that caters to Moscow’s growing creative class. The project is still at the design stage and is expected to take between 10 and 15 years to realise, with a model of gentrification that will fan outwards from ArtHouse, taking into its fold other upmarket art clusters such as ArtPlay and Winzavod. Once it is completed, anyone working in the creative industries, from fashion or film, will have the opportunity to rent a place to live or work in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moscow’s Krymskaya embankment Photograph: Wowhaus Archive

The man behind ArtKvartal, the “ideologue” as he’s known, is Andrey Grinev, co-founder of Citymakers, the urban planning firm that is one-third of the winning consortium to design Zaryadye Park, Moscow’s first new public park in 50 years.

Although unwilling to reveal the identity of his investors (“Let’s say not just oligarchs”), Grinev, who has a background in real estate development, concedes that his model of turbocharged gentrification is at odds with the usual processes involved.

“What has happened with neighbourhoods like Shoreditch?” he says. “At first the artists came and made the area popular, and then the prices start to rise and they leave and it becomes a bourgeois district like any other. Our plan is to create an area where creative people will stay.”

Grinev, who helped develop Moscow’s Ostozhenka district, one of the capital’s most exclusive postcodes known as the “Golden Mile”, hopes that with government subsidies ArtKvartal will be able to offer a mix of different rental options. Yet ritzy projects such as Door 19 and ArtHouse as well as another, EMA – a former industrial site that will be given over to artist residencies for a year before being converted into apartments – indicate that the creative label may just be a way to bump up the area’s property prices.

ArtKvartal has the backing, albeit only verbally, of three of Moscow city government’s most powerful figures: Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, his deputy Marat Khusnullin and the chief architect, Sergey Kuznetsov. While the project lacks a rock solid guarantee, Grinev’s commitment to sprucing up the area’s interstitial spaces works in his favour. “The development of public spaces remains one of the key priorities of Moscow’s urban policy,” says Kuznetsov. “All the new territories which are developing today receive permission only on the condition that the developers pay attention not only to the buildings being created there but also to the space between them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The staff of Door 19. Photograph: Studio PH.D

Following the wildly popular transformation of Gorky Park, presided over by “Moscow’s hipster culture minister” Sergey Kapkov, the renovation of the city’s public spaces has become a priority for those in the municipal government. In 2011, the Soviet-era park underwent a multimillion dollar revamp; out went the rusting funfair rides and passed-out drunks and in came ping-pong tables, a contemporary art gallery, free Wi-Fi and a dozen new cafes and bars. For the first time in years, Muscovites felt as if their city was becoming liveable.

Bolstered by the success of the renovation and its corollary – support for the mayor and his ministers – the city government has reapplied this formula to the city’s other parks. Not one to miss a trick, in 2012, President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the creation of Zaryadye Park.

A year later the winning consortium headed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architectural bureau that designed New York’s High Line, was announced. Already beset by delays, for now, a question mark hangs over the future of the park. “First of all, politically it’s not the greatest time to have an American firm doing something near the Kremlin,” says Oleg Shapiro, co-founder of architectural bureau Wowhaus. “Secondly, what they came up with is really expensive.”

With its emphasis on public spaces, Sobyanin’s vision for Moscow stands in contrast to that of his predecessor, the notorious former mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, whose 18-year-rule ended in his disgraceful dismissal in 2010. Although Luzhkov oversaw the oil-fuelled transformation of Moscow from a dreary Soviet capital into a glamorous metropolis with shiny new buildings and roads, change came at the expense of the city’s historic architecture, and amid allegations of nepotism and corruption. The upshot was a curtailment of powers associated with the mayoral position; despite this, the Moscow municipal government continues to be a powerful entity in its own right.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A render of the proposed ArtKvartal district gives a sense of its ambitious scale

“Those who are in charge of the city’s development behave differently to the federal government,” says Shapiro. “Moscow is very different to the rest of Russia. It’s like a country in a country.”

After designing a slew of contemporary wooden structures in Gorky Park including an open-air cinema, Wowhaus has become the architectural bureau of choice for those in the city government. Most recently, the firm converted a four-lane road on Krymskaya Embankment into a riverside park, featuring wave-shaped benches, fountains and artists’ studios.

Obtaining permission and funding for the project was straightforward, says Shapiro. “What’s most important is when your ideas somehow coincide with what the power wants,” he says.

VDNKh, a Soviet-era exhibition centre, is the latest public space to get the Gorky Park treatment. The grandiose and rather curious-looking complex, which is larger than Monaco, was built in 1935 for propaganda purposes, with wedding-cake pavilions dedicated to each of the republics of the USSR as well as to Soviet achievements such as electrification.

After years of neglect, this April, VDNKh’s new management cleared out the illegal traders and shish-kebab stands and replaced them with chi-chi cafes, landscaped gardens and cycle paths. An aquarium, touted as the largest in Europe, is set to open later this year.

Russia may be is known for its red-tape, but the speed with which the first stage of renovation took place is impressive. “It was built in the 1930s as a symbol of the Soviet empire and now that our government wants to rebuild the empire of course they want their symbols to be restored,” says Shapiro.



Kuba Snopek, a lecturer at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, describes the redesign of VDNKh, as a kind of “hipster Stalinism”. “It’s strange to have a strong Stalinist space, which is actually fashionable and tries to be very light,” he says. “It’s very interesting to see how these spaces are accommodating things which in the west are associated with freedom and liberal tendencies.” Noting the turn towards fixing up public spaces, Snopek says that Russia tends to look towards the west for architectural trends. “But it’s always happening with some lag and it always comes up a bit different,” he says.

For Kuznetsov, Moscow’s chief architect, VDNKh has a “special aura which must be preserved”. “I would, in fact, not solely link VDNKh with the name of Stalin,” he says. “Rather, it is unique in its encyclopedia of Soviet period architecture and I very much hope that all new facilities being built on VDNKh’s territory will be designed and built taking this context into account.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gorky Park. Photograph: Wowhaus Archive

Many of those involved in the 2011 and 2012 anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow view the transformation of these public spaces into western-style wonderlands as nothing more than a conciliatory move designed to silence dissenting voices.

“The reconstruction of Gorky Park was done just in time to distract people from all the protests, government corruption and stolen votes in the parliamentary election,” says Katerina Shcherbakova, a student at the British Higher School of Art and Design. “After the renovation it became impossible to say that the Department of Culture was corrupt or that our government didn’t care about its people, or that it hated the west and wanted a return to the Soviet Union.”

Writing in the London Review of Books, Peter Pomerantsev notes a similarity between the transformation of Moscow and Russia under Catherine the Great. “Catherine bought up some of Europe’s best art to create the Hermitage, corresponded with Voltaire, and had Diderot stay at court,” writes Pomerantsev. “But when Enlightenment ideas started to be expressed in real politics, Catherine cracked down.”

Those responsible for designing Moscow, such as Grinev and Shapiro, take a more pragmatic approach. “What should we do?” says Grinev, whose negotiations over ArtKvartal are ongoing. “Fight for them [freedoms]? Leave the country? Or make our lives as beautiful and comfortable as we can and not care about the freedoms we don’t have. I prefer the third way.”