Human Beings for Commoners - Multi-storey Russia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Are there limits to imperfection? Or are they not? A movement for the construction of human beings is growing throughout the country. 30 floors are not enough? No, let's get 40, or even better - 70. The height of 100 meters is no longer a skyscraper. And what's wrong - cheap, cheerful, colossal profit! And the smaller we cut, the larger it is! As in the shops - not in bulk, not in bulk, but in slices! Studios of 15-16 square meters, holes - it's no longer a shame. Crawling out of the box early in the morning - crawling into the night, and living - all day in the city.

“What are you so scared of, this is a global trend,” the hired pro will say. "There is an epidemic of skyscrapers," adds another. "You can't live like that!" - and this is a cry from the crowd of those who want a normal, human habitation. And he does not want cities-funnels, in a circle of houses closed by battalions - plates up to the sky, "flat-faced", as they say on the street, tens of floors, wells, window to window. They grow everywhere. Not cheese, but a cheese product, not a house, but a housing product. This is the language of the largest developers to whom Russia's great cities are slowly surrendering.

Mamon. She has many faces, many words to cover her, but the essence is the same - to take, and after us even a flood. Bigger, higher, fractional barracks, in order to sell at a higher price, to remove as much as possible from a meter. Where are the city authorities? Why are they driving us into this living hell?

Our big cities will start to deteriorate inexorably. These are future ghettos, favelas, places of social explosions. Do the owners of construction projects want to live like this? Forever in danger of fire under the dome of the sky? In the din of other families? In honeycombs? In every morning torture to get out, because everyone needs to take the elevator down - at this time.

How to give birth and be with children there? In a rectangular geometry of space, cut into cells? In buildings that look like a multi-story prison? Our demographics are bad - but they will never get better. These barracks houses are for singles, to sleep and disperse, not to live as a family. Do we have desertification in the regions? Are people flocking to Moscow, St. Petersburg and major cities? Building in this way is the best way to drive the population of Russia into 10-15 largest urban agglomerations! Dislocation, an idea that has been seriously discussed for several years. Not at home, but overnight stays, not a city, but a funnel of "flat-faced" people, not people, but objects for mass processing of brains and bodies.

Is the proportion of immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities growing in cities? You have to be delicate when different cultures and tribes collide. Where will they live? It is known in advance - where it is cheap, in residential ghettos. But are these flat, endless, forty-fortieth floors a melting pot? The answer is no. Do you want security? Perhaps you are even in uniform? Then you should know that we ourselves, with our own hands, are squeezing the population so that the risks of cultural conflicts are as high as possible. At the first financial crisis or an accidental fight. Or even with interruptions in energy, water, heat, or whatever.

The time will come when these outskirts of the city will begin to turn into old, crumbling, endless walls, tortured by smog and people. Giant Khrushchevs, they will also have to be destroyed. But how long does it take? Panel houses from the 1990s are already in soot.

When you look at the mountains of housing that appear at the crossroads of highways, you do not understand - and what are they going to breathe there? How can you save yourself from decibels? Where to go from the dust, from the dirt of car streams? Do they not feel sorry for their children, their hearts, lungs, their God-given life? Every psychologist knows that in such a landfill, people become rats. At first they are happy - there is a corner, then they squabble and, finally, they die. They even want to escape from elite skyscrapers. It has been studied a hundred times up and down: where the population is crowded, there is a social pathology. They stop giving birth.

Is there not enough land for us? For the sake of several owners, for the sake of their pockets, for the sake of large house-building factories - do you need to drive people to the patch? This was not done even in the days of the administrative economy. At least there are spacious green courtyards left from it. Is it all for the "good of man"? Tell that to the architects! They repeat the same thing - we have masters, there is nowhere to go, not us, so others. And the children need to be fed. What they say - we blind, build and explain what happiness it is.

No, not happiness. Only dependent people can live in these houses. Those who can't get out of them. Those who do not love, do not give birth, do not think, hate. They cannot, with rare exceptions, gain property and freedom. Scary houses, in need of eternal brain processing, because the crowd in them is notoriously aggressive. Overcrowding, a hundred toilets overhead - these are human strife.

We are told - what about Shanghai, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York! But these are seaside, blown cities. Not in the middle of the plain, like Moscow. Not cities with a thousand-year history. Are we Chinese? Do we have an overpopulation problem? In London, no one makes wells out of human skyscrapers. High-rise City is offices. The rest are at the settlements. London is a low-rise city. In France, "Large ensembles" are blown up. There have been ethnic riots (Mingety, 1981). Someday we will have to remove these "ensembles" too.

Society is abuzz when rapidly, before our very eyes, the environment of life, the environment of love, the children's environment becomes inhuman. Not even a tenth is said. We quote: "clinic", "apocalypse", "madhouse" - all in the same spirit. The invasion of plates, gigantomania in housing, the subordination of architecture to mammon - all this is a new drift in our life. Why do we need this when there is only one goal - to be proportionate to a person? Why, when Moscow and the Moscow region (47 thousand square kilometers) are larger in area than the Netherlands or Switzerland? And they are only a small piece of Central Russia. Less than a tenth of its land! The Russian state, why?

Yakov Mirkin (Head of the International Capital Markets Department of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences).