"Genetic code" of the St. Petersburg Residential Environment (to the 300th Anniversary of Russian Regular City Blocks)

Abstract

It is considered that the concepts of new urban planning standards for the Russian Federation and Moscow, which are currently being developed, attach particular importance to the quarterly development system. In this regard, it is proposed to pay attention to the experience of St. Petersburg, where the hippodamic layout on a large scale began to be used for the first time in Russia. It has been shown that over the past three hundred years in the historical center of the city on an area of thousands of hectares a dense urban fabric has developed, the uniqueness of which is tried to determine by referring to the "genetic code" of St. Petersburg. It is proposed to concretize this notion and consolidate conceptions that ensured the purposeful development of the city. It is emphasized that the huge intra-quarter spaces of St. Petersburg have been little studied to date - many works are devoted to the architectural and artistic image of representative buildings along the front of the quarters, and the phenomenon of the intra-quarter environment at the applied level was affected only by studies of the 1970s (A.V. Makhrovskaya, G.D. Platonov). It is suggested that it is the limitedness of the initial information base that explains the appearance of a simplified view of the historical center of St. Petersburg as a single "environmental area", which is present in normative and methodological guidelines and design concepts. It is proposed to carry out an architectural and urban planning inventory of the blocks included in this area to fix the set morphotypes.