unlocking hidden spaces – industrial belt regeneration

St. PEtersburg

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Russia
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Client

City of St. Petersburg

Project

Regeneration framework masterplan for 40 km² of industrial land, Zoom in masterplan t0 100 ha site.

Stages

2016 Design Competition
2017 Pilot zone design

Team

Markus Appenzeller, Ildar Biganyakov, Arseniy Konnov, Yana Golubeva, Voktor Korotych

Awards

2016 International Design Competition, 1st Prize

We changed

A dilapidated divider turns into a connective urban tissue

Transformation

+ Using the existing industrial landscape as the base for a mixed use city fabric
+ Reuse of existing infrastructure for the new district

Climate

+ Open space network based urban development
+ Preservation of existing urban wilderness

Collaboration

+ MLA+ in close connection with local users and urban pioneers
+ MLA+ working in an integrated, multidisciplinary team of experts
The vast majority of projects in the future will not be on the green fields anymore but on sites that have been used before. Consequently, planning needs to deal with the increased complexity this creates. It’s not a blank slate where every thinkable condition can be generated. It is a context that is already loaded with meaning and uses. Using the many existing elements of the context as a driving force to define the ‘re’-generation not only makes best use of existing assets, but also extends and loads an existing identity with new meaning. St. Petersburg is famous for its historic core. After World War II, the city was extended in a southern direction beyond an industrial belt.
Today – with the decline of industrial production, the ‘industrial grey belt’ has become a divider in the city. At the same time, the area has developed unique qualities unexpected in proximity of the city center. The regeneration framework developed accepts the spatial conditions that have been formed by the needs of industry and redefines their use in such a way that new qualities emerge that form the DNA of a new, third St. Petersburg. Old railway lines become linear parks, old industrial buildings form key features of future development, and existing centralities and key infrastructures become the centres of future neighbourhoods to develop. The new neighbourhoods establish a new development pattern that lead to a more permeable mix use urban fabric that is capable of housing new functions of city wide nature like universities, major cultural venues and even public programs whose emergence is unknown to date.

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