By Shan Dasheng, Research Team on “A Comparative Study on the Development and Governance of Typical Capital Cities”, DRC

Research Report, Special Issue, No 28, 2016 (Total NO 1503) 2016-06-27

Abstract: Compared with many world metropolises, Moscow’s development is quite different from them. The present city of Moscow was rebuilt by the government of former Soviet Union. The project was made according to government’s decisive plans without detailed discussions or elaborations about the pros and cons of city rebuilding. Over the years, the city construction has revealed a number of defects mainly including: the number of urban population increased drastically for a time due to scattered management and loose planning; the inappropriate population and industrial layout have led to the separation between job and residential locations and caused huge inconvenience to urban life; the strengthened radiating-annular spatial structure is unsuitable for the complex layout of urban activity and has caused severe traffic congestion; the compressed mode of urbanization has ignored the improvement of people’s livelihood, led to inadequate self-adjustment mechanisms for market and society and made the quality of urban life inappropriate and inactive; the unprofessional urban planning has made the city lack coordination with development of the contiguous areas. The implications we could draw are as follows: we should make urban plans for the capital more scientific, normal standard and authoritative; uphold the urban development concept of “putting people in the first place”; systematically optimize the urban spatial layout and structure; promote the overall and coordinated development of Beijing and the surrounding areas, and allow urban management to become more scientific and targeted to social demand.

Key words: urban development, urban governance, lessons, Moscow