New Moscow, or Big Moscow, is one of the largest urban development projects one could think of now, and it appeared out of the blue just several months ago. In June 2011 the then president Medvedev came up with the initiative to expand the borders of the city of Moscow. The decision was to annex a part of the Moscow Region, the 148 hectares to the south-west of the city, more than doubling its size. The decision, purely top-down, will take force on July 1, 2012, a year after the proposal was first made public.

On February 21 it was announced that the Moscow Government’s expert group selected 10 teams which will participate in the development of the concept plan of the future Moscow agglomeration. Each team (most have several foreign and/or Russian collaborators) is granted €250,000. A series of seminars is to be held during spring and summer 2012, the first one having been planned in a month’s time. According to Aleksandr Kuzmin, Moscow’s head architect, the seminars will be open for journalists. A joint team will be formed in September 2012 to develop the final version of the concept plan. The Moscow Government thus adopted the competition model, first tried out in the Grand Paris project.

The 10 teams are:

- Architectural firm “Ostozhenka”, Russia

- Chernihov’s architectural studio, Russia

- Moscow Architectural Institute, Russia

- Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, Russia

- Antoine Grumbach et associés, France

- l’AUC, France

- OMA, Netherlands

- Ricardo Bofill, Spain

- Studio Associato Bernardo Secchi Paola Viganò, Italy

- Urban Design Associates, USA

The project consists of three parts: the Moscow agglomeration, the city of Moscow with newly joined areas and the new federal government center.

Follow the topic (in Russian): RIA Novosti, RIA Realty, Expert.