Isola industriale. Development strategy of Paveletskaya industrial zone in Moscow

The city of Moscow currently is one of the most intensively developing magalopolises of the World. Following the changes in urban-planning politics on a governmental level, it is impossible not to notice the positive shifts in the life of russian Capital. Being in the process of the intense growth, the city constantly demands new resources and land ones as well. However, after the rise of the role of urbanism and town-planning, city administration dares to open the doors for the pioneering and innovative projects of the spatial redevelopment. Major part of russian cities during the process of concentric expansion have recieved the so called "industrial belts" - huge mono-functional zones for the placement of factory and industries. At the city scale the overall area of such territories can reach enormous sizes. Forming a ring these industrial zones divide the downtown and residential areas, which leads to everyday cycle of periphery-center and visa versa movements, making various transport and ecological troubles for the city. During the last decade the definitive course was taken to the complex removal of heavy industries from the city boundaries and subsequent revitalisation of the industrial belt, its transformation into solid integrated city structure. Various architectural competiotions were held in the last years to find the optimal concepts of future development of these territories, among them most well-known cases are ZIL and Serp and Molot. Our team is interested in evolution of our Capital and the whole country, that is why we have chosen this topic, since it fits perfectly the current trend of town planning activity in Russia. In this regard, we are finding really strange the situation that the first and the most centrally located industrial zone in Moscow still have neither plan nor strategy of development. Our project consists of analytic research of the Paveletskaya industrial zone present state, strategy and concept (based on this investigated data), variation of conceptual proposals envisioning the possibilities of transformation of two central quarters, which are the most polluted and unpleasent for now. During the work on this research we have studied different successful examples of familiar projects of industrial areas redevelopment in Russia and around the world. The proposed approach and ideas have qualitative pragmatic character in order to be applied as a real project or as a base for the further architectural contest for such an important territory for Moscow.