"High-rise buildings are a toxic asset with a short lifespan."

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

The massive construction of reinforced concrete high-rise buildings is a dead end for the country. Such housing is dangerous, unstable to cataclysms, resource-intensive, extremely expensive to dispose of and creates big problems for future generations, says academician Alexander Krivov.

The national project "Housing and Urban Environment" aims at a sharp, one and a half times increase in housing construction by 2024 - up to 120 million square meters per year. The attitude towards such a target is ambiguous. Federal officials cannot admit the impracticability of the presidential directive, but it seems that they do not really believe in success: as long as the construction site does not grow, but falls. A number of governors and developers directly declare that such a task is impracticable and unnecessary, if only because there is no effective demand in the country that can absorb such a large amount of housing.

Famous urban planner, academician of the International Academy of Architecture, scientific director of the Central Research Institute of Construction of the Ministry of Construction of Russia Alexander Krivovtakes an unusual position. He believes that it is necessary and possible to dramatically increase the volume of construction. However, this will require abandoning multi-storey construction as an expensive and toxic asset with a limited lifespan. The stake should be placed on low-rise housing, especially since most of the country's population wants to live in individual houses. The transition to a new housing model and a new way of life can be a way out of the systemic crisis of society.

120 million square meters per year is a necessity

Is there a need to increase the volume of housing construction up to 120 million square meters per year?

- There is a need. We still have a low average housing supply - 23 square meters per person. For comparison: in Europe the average is about 50, in the USA - 70. Even in Eastern Europe, the average is about 40 square meters. Ukraine is ahead of us, we are only overtaking Romania.

In Russia, the housing stock today amounts to 3.7 billion square meters. But we must also take into account its quality: about 40 percent of housing is not connected to the central sewerage system. The housing stock must be increased to at least four and a half billion square meters. With a population of 150 million people, this will give an average per capita rate of 30 "squares". If the fund is five billion, then the security will increase to 32-33 square meters. This is the minimum indicator for more or less developed countries. By the way, the level of scientific and technological development of states directly correlates with the level of housing provision.

The second factor: in a few years, home retirement, the number of dilapidated and dilapidated housing will begin to increase. Starting from 2020, the panel houses built in 1970 will be fifty years old. And the 1970s was a time of mass housing construction, when many tens of millions of square meters were built a year.

Are there more Panlek and block houses built in the 1970s than Khrushchev?

- Certainly. Five-storey buildings are relatively few: their total area in the country is about 130 million square meters (commissioned before 1965), and the houses commissioned from 1965 to 1976 - 260 million square meters. In 2020–2025, there will be no retirement of housing built in the 1970s, and we, having increased the volume of construction, will still be able to increase the supply of housing. Then this opportunity will not exist: a significant part of the new housing will go to cover the retiring fund.

The target - to bring the country's housing stock to five billion square meters - seems reasonable to me. Building 70-80 million square meters a year is not enough: in six years only 400-480 million square meters will be added, and this does not take into account the disposal of housing. Achievement of the rate of 120 million square meters per year is necessary. If you build less, there will be an increasing deterioration in living conditions.

Dangerous, expensive, not resistant to disasters

We will assume that you have proved the necessity theorem. But many doubt the possibility of such a sharp acceleration of construction

- With the current market model it is hardly possible, I agree. The passport of the national project states that by 2024, 80 million square meters of commissioning will fall on multi-storey housing. Last year, 43 million square meters were built. Almost double growth in a falling market? It is highly unlikely.

But it is much more important that the very path of multi-storey construction is a dead end. I will not talk about the negative impact of multi-storey reinforced concrete buildings on the demography, about the low comfort and inhumanity of the areas of twenty-five-storey buildings - this is exactly the number of storeys that have been approached recently in Russia. It is important that multi-storey housing is not only contrary to human nature, but also dangerous, expensive, very resource-intensive. It is no coincidence that neither in Europe nor in the United States they practically do not build such reinforced concrete high-rise buildings like ours.

What are the main disadvantages of high-rise buildings?

- For me, the negative impact on human health is obvious, but this is a controversial issue. However, it cannot be denied that in the event of a fire for houses above 17 floors, we do not have the means to save people. Not only with us. In London in 2017, a fire in a twenty-story building killed thirty people.

What's the problem? Modern fire-fighting equipment does not allow this?

- Yes, the ladders of special fire engines extend up to 63 meters, and the ability of people with limited mobility to use them has not been tested.

Multi-storey building construction is very expensive to build and operate. In a twenty-storey building, “losses” of space for smoke-free stairs, elevator shafts, corridors, and places for communications - 30–35 percent. Resources have to be spent on the construction of these areas, but they cannot be sold. In Soviet times, there was open data on the cost of construction: the cost per square meter of a seventeen-story building, even in relation to a nine-story building, was considered 30 percent higher.

High-rise buildings are functionally unstable to cataclysms. Any military conflict, terrorist attack or natural disaster can lead to colossal life support disasters. They cut off the electricity in the block of high-rise buildings - and that's it: elevators, pumps and sewerage do not work, houses are no longer heated.

And we do not take into account the cost of the building at all during the entire life cycle. And on average, only 20 percent of the total cost of a building during its entire life is spent on design and construction. The rest of the costs are for operation, repairs and disposal of materials. If we take into account all the costs, it turns out that the construction of high-rise buildings is a waste of huge resources today and the laying of mines for future generations.

The President has set a target to dramatically increase the volume of housing construction by 2024

In Russia, many times fewer people live in individual houses compared to other countries

Hundreds of millions of tons of construction waste

You say that high-rise buildings are a mine for future generations. What do you have in mind?

- We have come to an interesting, but little discussed topic: what to do with modern reinforced concrete high-rise buildings when their lifespan expires. According to GOST, it is determined at fifty years. The specific figure is not important now, there is only one outcome - demolition. Planned overhaul is possible. But these houses have low maintainability. It is quite easy to change insulation and utilities in a one-story house, but in a twenty-five-story house inhabited by people it is very difficult. In general, we do not have an industry for the overhaul of high-rise buildings. In any case, reinforced concrete houses will have to be demolished, and then serious problems appear.

The first is how to do it. I remember that after the earthquake in Spitak it was necessary to destroy and, if possible, dispose of only a few dozen panel five-story buildings. It was difficult due to the general accident rate of structures, but the main question is where and how to store scrap. In Moscow, five-story buildings are being destroyed with a cast-iron weight suspended from an arrow, but how can a twenty-five-story building be destroyed? There are no elegant ways to demolish high-rise buildings in the world - just blow them up. And what to do with the microdistrict? Isolate it all? Well, let's imagine that the house was destroyed, and then the following question arises: what to do with what is left of it?

Divide into fractions and reuse materials?

- Yes, but in order to transport it by car, it is necessary to grind what is left after the destruction or explosion. There are technologies, but they are energy intensive. And then it is necessary to separate the concrete from the metal at the plant: the metal is remelted, and the concrete can be crushed into small fractions and used as a filler in road construction. There are technologies for separation into fractions for small volumes, but how to solve this problem on a mass scale is still unknown. There are no effective technologies for the destruction and disposal of reinforced concrete structures in the world. And then the next question arises: where to put all this scrap?

Is there a lot of garbage from the dismantling of one building?

- A square meter of a reinforced concrete building weighs approximately 1.3 tons. The five-story building with an area of five thousand "squares" turns into eight thousand tons of construction waste. In general, we will have hundreds of millions of tons of it. This is where the devilish irony of reinforced concrete is hidden: it is an eternal structural material, but houses made of it have a very short service life.

Moscow wants to carry garbage after the demolition of five-story buildings in wagons to the Arkhangelsk region, to Shies. It's not cheap, to put it mildly. And an acute social situation has already arisen there. Local residents are against burying the capital's garbage on their land.

Is there a need to demolish the Khrushchevs today? Academician Bocharov believes that they are still quite strong and their resource is much longer than fifty years

- Reinforced concrete is an eternal material. It is a supporting element, and it could carry further. But the insulation is stratified, the engineering networks inside the house become unusable. In principle, a five-story building can be repaired. But then you need to scrape off all the rest from the supporting elements and do it again. In the Soviet Union, massive measures of reconstruction and repair were carried out: engineering systems, insulation, windows, doors were changed. Approximately ten million square meters a year were reconstructed, which is quite a lot. Now it is believed that it is much easier to demolish and build a new house on the vacated plot already of 20-25 floors.

How did you plan to solve the problem with five-story buildings after the end of their service life fifty years ago? What did their authors think then?

“They were supposed to be reconstructed in fifty years. But we must understand that the decision to build panel five-story buildings in the mid-1950s was forced. After the war, people lived in barracks, they had to be resettled. And it is necessary to build very quickly and industrially. In-line production technologies were mastered very well during the war. What to do? Panel houses are being built in Europe. Let's go, look, buy - and go!

Of course, individual solutions for reconstruction were considered. But those techniques are difficult to use now. There was a completely different attitude to energy costs: energy was almost free - gasoline cost 28 kopecks per liter.

In the 1950s, forecasts for technological development were optimistic. It seemed that by the end of the century incredible technologies would be developed - almost the same as a little later in the Strugatskys' book "Noon, XXI Century".

But today it is no longer so important why it was built like this in the 1950s. The correct question is why we continue to build almost the same houses today, although we know a lot more. That the utilization of a demolished building is not two percent of its cost throughout its entire life cycle, as it is written in the projects, but is comparable to the cost of construction. We know that we cannot carry out massive reconstruction, and there is nowhere to put the future construction waste.

In thirty years, our descendants will face an incredible task: what to do with hundreds of millions of square meters of dilapidated reinforced concrete housing built by us and before us? We are taking land and strength from the next generations on a colossal scale. This is not even irresponsibility, but historical cynicism. We need to stop this vicious practice as soon as possible and figure out what to do with the already built reinforced concrete high-rise buildings.

Why, knowing about the shortcomings of reinforced concrete high-rise buildings, do we continue to build them?

- The answer is extremely simple: in the current market model, this is the most profitable and fastest way to generate income from land. This is beneficial to the strongest participant in the whole process - developers and investors. Future problems are ignored, and buyers are forced to purchase the property that is being built for them.

Small housing prevails in Russia

People want to live in their own homes

Your main thesis is the transition to low-rise housing. How do you see him?

- Housing should be low-rise, economical, recyclable, nature-like. At the same time, a low-rise building can be very different: estates on large plots, and compact single-family houses, and townhouses, and three-story buildings with apartments. There must be a developed system of types of life for different social groups, for different needs. For many, it is important that there is a clearly defined personal land space. A place that he can develop in his own way. So that a person does not live in antagonism with nature, but in balance.

In the largest country in the world, we live very crowded. Cramped in the subway, cramped in apartments. This extinguishes both spirit and intellectual life. It is very important that there is space for self-realization, so that there is space, freedom.

Polls show that most of the Russian population wants to live in their home

- Yes, according to polls, it is 60-70 percent of the population. People are forced to live in apartments in high-rise buildings - the whole system drives them there. In Russia, only a third of families live in individual houses. For comparison: in the United States - 72 percent, in Germany - 82 percent, in Finland - 89 percent.

It is believed that single-family houses are more expensive than apartments, and the suburban lifestyle presupposes high household incomes

- I do not think so. The prime cost per square meter of low-rise housing is several times lower than that of high-rise buildings, we talked about this. In addition, when building their houses, the cost and cost tend to coincide. As a result, the household budget of one and a half to two million rubles, taking into account loans, makes it possible to rely on either a house of one hundred square meters on their land, or a small one-room apartment on the nth floor. But the small apartments that are being built so actively now represent a demographic dead end: they are not suitable for families with children.

But there is also the cost of land and communications

- The state is allocating trillions of rubles for the Housing and Urban Environment national project. You can allocate land for free or inexpensively, communications can be let down by the state at its own expense. There is an excellent experience in the Belgorod region, where such a system has been operating for fifteen years and yields excellent results.

Academician of the International Academy of Architecture, Scientific Director of the Central Research Institute of Construction of the Ministry of Construction of Russia Alexander Krivov: "Multi-storey housing is not only contrary to human nature, but also dangerous, expensive, very resource-intensive"

OLEG SERDECHNIKOV

A new way of life as a civilizational challenge

The classic question: what to do? Can you summarize the steps required to transition to a new market model?

- First, we need a transition to low-rise and single-family housing construction. The first step is obvious: to extend mortgages and other lending instruments to single-family houses (now they account for only one percent of mortgage loans), to actively include new forms of accumulation of household investments.

Secondly, it is necessary to carry out a targeted adjustment of legislation to solve the problems of national projects. Thirdly, it is necessary to eliminate the artificial shortage of land in settlements, to correct the irrational structure of land use. In order to build a billion square meters of housing in the coming years, it is necessary to create a conveyor belt for the preparation of territories, for their involvement in circulation, for the provision of communications. We have only one percent of the country's territory occupied by settlements. It is necessary that this indicator would be at the level of 1, 2–1, 25 percent for the country. In the Vladimir region - this is seven percent, in the Belgorod region - twelve. And in Germany, settlements occupy about 20 percent.

Fourth, it is necessary to select a group of pilot regions in characteristic climatic zones in order to work out the change in the structure of land use. We also need a group of experimental projects where you can try different building technologies and financial schemes, both for low-rise construction and for the reconstruction of buildings. Fifth, it is necessary to select, test and refine the appropriate construction technologies. Low-rise construction should become truly industrial: quick assembly on site from factory-made house kits.

When you talk with governors and developers about the Belgorod experience of low-rise construction, you always hear: "This experience cannot be replicated, because all the land near the cities belongs to private companies." Do you need to nationalize part of the land to launch a low-rise construction project?

- I do not think. The state has enough land resources. And when the large landowners see that the state is seriously investing, they themselves will transfer part of the land. Otherwise, they will not develop them.

Does the new approach require a change in the settlement system?

- You need to rely on the existing settlement system. You cannot imagine new places for placing a populated area; people found them in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But new points of growth in mass construction will naturally arise. First, "Baltic Russia" - from Sosnovy Bor and Ust-Luga to Kingisepp. This section is vacant, raised along the relief, jobs are being actively created here, and the final hub of Nord Stream 2 is located. A city of a new type could emerge here - a low-rise one, coupled with nature. New areas of development could appear on the intercontinental infrastructure connecting Europe and Asia - these are Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Kazan. A new core of Russia can be created there.

But in order not to drown in details, I want to emphasize the most important thing. For me, this conversation is not only about changing the type of development, technologies and changes in housing policy. It's about finding a new way of being. Indeed, today there is not only an economic, environmental or geopolitical crisis, but also a host of other crises, including a crisis of meanings. And the new housing model is a way out of this crisis. At the first level, we say that we are a homo planeticus, a planetary man who arranges his life in accordance with the nature of the Earth. And on the second - that there is a Russian way of life, which is different from everyone else. For example, you live in a wooden but high-tech house in a beautiful place in nature, you have your own sauna. Eat healthy food, have a strong family, lead a meaningful lifestyle, and so on. You communicate in a circle of like-minded people and at the same time you are not divorced from civilization. The search for a new model of life is becoming a civilizational task.

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