Look At These

I'm a bit overwhelmed every day by the enormity of Moscow. It's not the amount of people as much as the size. Moscow's official population at around 12 million people but official records only counts legal citizens. During the tussle with Georgia, it was revealed that more Georgians live in Moscow than the entire country of Georgia. Moscow is huge. The socio-political measure of City Proper, which balances city populations with their approximate surface area to create an estimated population density, ranks Moscow as the world's 6th most populated city. 

It done shows. 

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Despite the city's obvious metropolitan sprawl, there really isn't a downtown to Moscow, mostly cuz it's all one big downtown. There is no true Moscow Suburbia. Nashville has about 1,000,000 people that call it home, but the 1,000,000 naturally don't live in the city, hence the moniker Greater Nashville. There is no Greater Moscow because everyone lives inside the city. There are no downtown skycrapers, just several chance clusters scattered about. The land outside the last ring of old Soviet buildings looks like the Panama City beachline. 

It's urban jungle fever and history is to blame. 

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Moscow began serious city clean up under Stalin's reign. The 1935 General Plan for the Renconstruction of Moscow, which involved widening streets and cutting roads through the mess of buildings and meandering lanes that choked major transportation, was created with the intent of urban renewal but the Stalinist ideal of modernism was hardly compatable with the older architecture models. As a result, the roads hardly experienced improvement reagrding transportation and the "curtain" buildings erected were basically pretegious looking facades that hid the wooden sprawl behind it. The fall of the Soviet Union and the financial explosion only seperated the class gap even further, creating in essence Two Moscows occupying the same space. The first is economically oblivious, whose wood shacks and kiosks are proof that architecture is hardly taken into consideration. The second is elite order of Moscow that is struggling to implement it's bottomless limit of exchange toward establishing global credibility through sugar coats of surface-leveled modern architecture. The American equivalent would be the upper middle class trend of buying everything on credit and living three time larger than your income allows you. But the personal consequences of credit are nothing compared to the consequences of Moscow ignoring it's own "big village" status in the ever growing Age of Technology. 

They've got the robot thing down though.

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I had the opportunity yesterday to walk around in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism and that's what got me thinking about all this. They had all these neat setups around the room for building plans and future construction projects, plus a huge to-scale map of Moscow in the very middle. Like I'm talking it was maybe 20 yards deep and wide and was covered with tiny detailed trees, houses, people, cars, etc. The presentations closest to the entrance dominated the scene, with choice lighting emphasizing extremely detailed models or future skycrapers and business offices, the main one is shown below with the train plus it's really near my house. To me, all the mirrored glass skyscrapers and postmodern architecture designs seemed like one big Russian reminder to itself that "yes! now we can be taken seriously", with a giant blind eye to the physical reality of delapidation, which are very literal reminders of what should be recognized and addressed, not ignored. 

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I don't even rap anyway, I rob.