On October 22 near Kyiv City State Administration the public activists held a meeting concerning the new general construction plan till 2025. This was another display of dissatisfaction with the provided changes in the architecture of the capital according to the new plan.
The main activists’ complaint is that the plan does not provide for preserving the historical image of the city, its architectural and cultural monuments and does not protect green zones from destruction. “If you look at the general construction plan, in the city center there are small red squares. In fact, it is everything that can be built up above the existing buildings,” director of the City Planning Institute Oleksandr SERHIIENKO remarked. “Such buildups can be as high as 50 meters. Thus high-rise construction will be legalized in the historical center of Kyiv.”
Activists hope that while the general construction plan is being designed, it will be possible to make a full stop in the struggle against the construction in the protective zones of St. Sophia Cathedral and Kyiv Cave Monastery. According to the activist Maryna SOLOVIOVA, the organization she heads, “Andriivska Landscape Initiative,” sent 443 applications concerning this issue to the MPs. “Now we are receiving many replies. In the Verkhovna Rada there is already a bill on a moratorium on construction on the territory of St. Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv Cave Monastery, and their protective zones. If the things continue going this way, Kyiv will lose its authenticity and will not be the city we love now.”
Oleksandr Serhiienko said that during the four years of Leonid Chernovetsky’s rule the surface of green zones in Kyiv diminished almost by half, from 6.6 thousand hectares to 3.7 thousand. Besides, the new general construction plan implies raising the living space from 60 million square meters to 86 million, or by 50 percent. However, the city limits remain the same…
According to Oleksandr Serhiienko, in order to find places for new buildings, the unified strategy for the development of Kyiv and its satellite towns should be designed, as it has been done in Paris. “Also Kyiv should plan its functioning taking into account the people coming to the capital from the suburbs every day for work, about 100,000 people, but the new general construction plan does not have any provisions for this,” the expert says.
“Before working on the new general construction plan it is necessary to collect the initial data of the old plan,” the head of the NGO “Let’s Protect Old Kyiv” Ihor LUTSENKO added. “In 2010 Mykola Azarov charged Oleksandr Popov to audit the green zones of Kyiv with the deadline in the second half of 2010. However, it is not ready yet. The city also has the traffic, but even the traffic has not been audited yet. It is necessary to know in order to understand if it is possible to construct buildings and inhabit this or that area with more people. If it had been done, we would see that some residential blocks and trade centers have been constructed illegally.”
With that the Facebook account of the general construction plan of Kyiv reads that the project is currently undergoing the expertise. It will have been finished by the end of November and then the document will be sent to the City Council for the final approval. The project is supposed to be adopted in February 2014.
