Partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, where his projects include mixed-use buildings in Rotterdam, a masterplan proposal for Moscow’s Skolkovo Centre for Innovation and the redevelopment of London’s Commonwealth Institute, which broke ground last month. He supervises OMA’s research and consulting arm, AMO, and teaches at Moscow postgraduate school Strelka.

Photo: Dieter Karner

Moscow is my kind of town, mainly because I don’t have a choice. Like others who have contributed to this section, I inevitably write about where work takes me and quite simply Moscow has been the place where my work has taken me most over the past two years. (I also have to secretly admit that Moscow seemed an apt choice in the face of the horrible Americanism that makes up the title of this column.)

In August 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia joined a global process of economic liberalisation. From a former communist stronghold, Russia became the world’s next ‘laissez faire’ playground almost overnight. While this shift clearly affected Russia as a whole, the effect is most palpable in Moscow. There even seems to be an opposite effect: with large parts of Russia dwindling, Moscow continues to thrive. Moscow occupies 0.05 per cent of Russia’s territory, while it contains eight per cent of its population. In other areas the asymmetry is even more dramatic: Moscow accounts for 10 per cent of Russia’s employment, 22 per cent of its GDP and 65 per cent of all foreign investment.

Moscow embodies a strange paradox: the more important Moscow becomes for Russia, the less it becomes like Russia. Moscow has come to constitute a kind of universe on its own: a state within the state. Muscovites enjoy a whole range of special conditions and privileges, which – although devised to help them withstand the first shocks of a capitalist system – have created a kind of strange divide within the city. On the one hand there is the official Moscow, featuring in censuses and municipal data; on the other hand there is the unofficial, or rather ‘real’ Moscow, with a large number of non-registered (illegal) residents, creating an economy unnoticed by official statistics. There is Moscow and there is Moscow. An ever larger bureaucracy has to go to ever greater lengths to administer an ever more schizophrenic reality.

Part of the transition to the market economy has been a sharp reduction of the city’s public sector. Successive, often rushed privatisations have propelled a situation of disarray in the absence of adequate means to manage it. As a result Moscow today suffers a number of very predictable deficits; mainly a growing level of inequality among its citizens. Even though Moscow boasts the largest number of billionaires in the world, for most the past 20 years has meant an escalation in the cost of living without a comparable rise in income. A booming property market has driven up the price of homes, particularly in the centre; increased commuter traffic has brought the transport system to the brink of exhaustion; illegal migration has created an ever larger shadow economy. In the meantime the city gets by on its own. There is a whole range of informal arrangements to deal with responsibilities previously held by an omnificent public sector, from an informal system of check and balances in the form of ‘public’ hearings, to the informal re-parceling of (formerly) public space, to a largely underexplored role of the church in secular matters such as real estate investment and, for the first time, the necessity to treat land as something other than an unlimited resource.

In 2011, a presidential decree – in what probably is only the first in a series of moves that could ultimately put Moscow City and Moscow Region under a single administrative system – announced the addition of a new Federal District to the south-west of the city. For all its probably less then elevated motives, the merger between the city and the region also constitutes a potentially interesting new beginning. When taken to its ultimate conclusion, Moscow will be the first megacity with administrative borders large enough to manage its entire agglomeration and therefore – at least in theory – will have the mandate to deal with its problems in an integral way. As such, Moscow’s new administrative borders are more than just a planning matter; they also form a serious impetus to rethink the above issues.

The scale of its new territory – somewhere between a large city and a small country – presents an interesting challenge both to conventional methods of urban planning as well as to the models of city governance. Rethinking Moscow in its new extended form presents a compelling reason to reinvent both. Perhaps the combination of an extensive history of state control, coupled to a raw exposure to the free market could unexpectedly help Moscow find a new balance between public and private, between planning and politics.

First published in AT233, November 2012