Moscow is a rapidly growing megacity rich with a beautiful center, historic architecture, public art, pleasant promenades and urban parks. But Moscow's picturesque city center is plagued by increasing traffic congestion and a rapidly growing periphery. Automobiles, like giant metal cockroaches, swarm through the city. They clog the streets and sidewalks of Moscow's beautiful urban quarters and make it difficult for pedestrians to walk to and around the heart of the city.

Read the complete article in the Moscow Times.

Memorable neighborhoods, towns, and cities are composed of specific types of places that share a unique ability to spark and continuously energize their communities. We have come to call them Everyday Squares. As part of Urban Design Associates' annual summer program, our Urban Researchers have immersed themselves in Pittsburgh to document, measure, and interview the curators of the Everyday Squares that are leading and sustaining the regeneration and vibrancy of the City's many great neighborhoods. The results of this effort are now published in an open-source manual that methodically walks through the essential criteria, dimensions, and life that Everyday Squares bring to town and neighborhood building. It is structured to be a useful and intuitive benchmarking and design tool that may be continuously updated using real examples from communities elsewhere. Although it is dedicated to the City of Pittsburgh, we know through our observations that similar lessons can be found in and calibrated to regions and cultures everywhere.

Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about Everyday Squares "Walkabout: Everyday sharing may be right route to successful retail"

The Cincinnati Central Riverfront Plan will receive the American Planning Association's 2013 National Planning Excellence Award for Implementation. Urban Design Associates prepared the central riverfront master plan for Hamilton County and the City of Cincinnati in 1996.

For more information, please visit the APA National Planning Awards 2013 or click on the press release, below.

Press Release

The UDA team's winning design for the Federal District included a dual strategy for the urban development approach that links regeneration of under-utilized land in the existing city, Old Moscow, with the expansion of new infrastructure to service the new Federal Center and adjacent districts in the New Moscow.

The City of Moscow conducted a nine month International design competition with ten teams participating in the development of strategies and designs for the metropolitan region, the city and the new Federal District. The design brief called for new transportation systems, a financial center, a research and development district and a university district as the anchor uses in the new expansion area.

The character of the new city expansion area builds on the inherited urban spaces, parks, block types and scale of buildings found in the most successful places within Old Moscow. Larry Beasley of Beasley Associates, located in Vancouver, proposed a series of potential development and administrative tools to facilitate public/private initiatives throughout the city.The proposed physical form for New Moscow builds on the natural system of waterways, lakes, forests and meadows as the foundation for a green infrastructure network.

For more information, visit Capital Cities Planning Group.

Report

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