Planning solutions

In the last 15 years, due to the construction boom in the capital, all more or less suitable sites have been bought up by developers and have long been occupied by residential complexes, office and retail facilities. Today we have to look for new construction sites where the eyes of developers never even fell before - in industrial clusters, locations of linear facilities (in particular, power lines and railway lines), as well as in areas of the first wave of industrial housing construction. In old Moscow, industrial territories today occupy more than 18 thousand hectares (17% of the area). This is quite a large potential for the construction of new residential and commercial facilities. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a program has been in place in the capital to reorganize a number of industrial enterprises and partially or completely withdraw their capacities outside the Moscow Ring Road. It covers 13,000 hectares of Moscow's Rust Belt. In some cases, vacated sites are given to developers. From 2011 to 2016, more than 60 planning projects for former industrial territories were approved. About a third of them are now under implementation, for example, the territory of the ZIL and "Hammer and Sickle" factories, as well as the mirror factory near the Botanichesky Sad metro station. This is only a small part of where new construction is possible. Also of interest are the territories currently occupied by power lines laid by air. Quite large exclusion zones are provided for them - up to 100 m. Now there are discussions about whether these objects need to be transferred underground, in what volume and in what time frame. In 2018, in the west of Moscow, a project was implemented to relocate overhead lines underground during the construction of the Southern understudy of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. If this initiative turns into a city program, then the capital could free up significant areas suitable for residential and commercial construction.

Another program is the renovation of Khrushchevkas. The city has already selected 351 launch sites for construction, more than 5 thousand houses are included in the resettlement program. Despite the fact that taking part in this project is not easy for both designers and developers, there is something to compete for. For houses that are built under this program, non-standard design solutions are provided. This is a good experience for all participants in the process, which will allow building in the populated areas of old Moscow, where new facilities have not appeared for decades.

Another focus of new construction in the future may be lands occupied by infrastructural facilities. The federal program for the construction of intercity high-speed rail lines, for example, may lead to the reconstruction of station complexes and their infrastructure. Similar projects are already being implemented in many cities of Russia, in particular in St. Petersburg, where housing is being built on the territory of the former Varshavsky railway station.

How to build?

Despite the fact that the sites described above have interesting locations, they are not the easiest to develop. Construction on the site of former industrial areas can be very complex, which must be taken into account during the feasibility study of the project. For example, the site may contain contaminated soils or engineering networks that require removal, but the documentation for them has been lost. If these points are not taken into account at the preparatory stage, during the preparation of pre-project documentation, problems will appear when construction begins and the economics of the project will decline.

An important factor is geology. Engineering and geological surveys are most often carried out when the customer has all the necessary documents for the site and access to it. During pre-project preparation, it is often impossible to conduct such studies. However, this step is critical in designing and calculating the economy. If there is no access to the site, then you need to resort to archival geology. If this information is also missing, designers can guess what soils are located on your site, based on knowledge of neighboring sites. This information is extremely important. I know many cases when the project was slowed down due to the fact that bad soils were revealed at the design stage. This required a revision of the type of foundation: it needed to be replaced with a more expensive and labor-intensive option. The rapid development of the metro in the capital is a separate issue. This is a secure facility, not all information about which is publicly available. Therefore, developers can learn about plans to build under a specific section of the metro tunnel already during the examination, that is, at the final stage of project approval. In this case, the customer has to urgently receive additional information about the metro facilities and the restrictions that they impose on the project, and, of course, make adjustments.

Do not forget about the numerous government, diplomatic and classified objects. When a developer plans a future building, he evaluates its impact on the surrounding structures and utilities. Access to the objects listed above is usually limited or completely excluded, so it is impossible to examine them in order to determine the permissible degree of influence. This is also the risk of the customer, which he is ready or not ready to bear.

How to ensure the quality?

Summarizing all of the above, I must state that building in old Moscow is becoming more difficult every year, and the cost of a mistake is higher. To take into account all possible discrepancies, so that all sections of the project documentation are agreed, today it is not only vital, it is necessary to use modern design approaches, such as BIM technologies, which allow you to create an information model of the future building. In it, you can assign attributes to each element, such as the class of reinforcement, concrete, section, and also take into account the mutual influence of elements on each other. When you change one of them, you can immediately see how it will affect the rest of the design elements. Ideally, this model should exist not only at the construction stage, but throughout the entire life cycle, until the building is disposed of.

The building information model is an additional control tool for both the designer and the customer. In the classical form, the customer receives the project in the form of separate sections. Combining them with each other, even engineering networks, is a laborious and complex process that can only be done by an experienced specialist. Often, customers do not have enough of them, so design errors are detected only at the construction stage. This affects the financial component of the project and delays the construction. If there is a BIM model, then the overlays can be tracked as soon as the project is received. Developing BIM models of an object is a steady trend in construction. Many Russian developers who work in Moscow already include in the contract with the designers a clause on the transfer of the BIM model of the building to them along with the finished project. In the near future, the Moscow State Expertise will also begin to accept them. The difficulty is that the new technology is accompanied by a legal vacuum. In particular, there is no single standard for preparing such a model, its level of detail, etc. But this is a question for the professional community, which is yet to be settled.

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