The inside story of Tatarstan’s remarkable, controversial green urban revolution

It all started very badly, Kazan’s Deputy Chief Architect, Daria Tolovenkova, recounts. In July 2015, a worker took a chainsaw to a much-beloved, century-old weeping willow in Uritsky Park, one of the oldest green spaces in the capital city of Tatarstan, and one of the first to be subject to renovation under the Republic’s audacious programme to transform its parks and public spaces. A scandal immediately broke out: “It turned out that people had deep feelings towards this tree, that half of the city grew up around it. That’s when [the city administration] understood that you have to talk to people… ideally before construction works get under way.”

Tatarstan’s makeover project is a grand example of what is known as Russian as blagoustroistvo: the improvement and beautification of parks, public spaces, pavements, and other usable fragments of the urban fabric. In recent years, blagoustroistvo has become both big business and a governmental priority across Russia, and Tatarstan is a case study for the myriad controversies and peculiarities it entails.

Tatarstan’s new spaces are not limited to the centre of Kazan — they are located in cities, towns, and villages throughout the Republic. To the naked eye, their aesthetic seems consistent and contemporary: there is lots of timber-cladding, the benches and pavilion buildings take on Zaha Hadid-esque abstract forms. There is fashionable public art (fractal geometric bears, various shapes and figures made out of twigs), and playgrounds and sports facilities. In Kazan’s Gorkinskо-Ometyevsky Forest, there is a public pavilion called the “Eco-Centre”, clusters of play-areas, numerous cafes and snack bars, a skating pavilion, and a large box-park made out of shipping container-like units, which, I am told, will soon become a co-working space “for start-up entrepreneurs”. There are also lots of weedy plants and meadow-like areas characteristic of the naturalistic “New Perennials” movement in global landscape urbanism.

This is a radical departure from the aesthetic of blagoustroistvo and public architecture in Kazan pre-2015, which tended towards lavish fountains, glossy tiling, shiny pyramids, soaring mosques, and grandiose palaces housing offices for bureaucrats — the most magnificent of all being the Palace of Farmers, opened in 2010 in the shadow of the city’s white-walled Kremlin. But it is consistent with the eco-high-tech, New York High-Line aesthetic which began to spread throughout Russia following the reconstruction of Moscow’s Gorky Park in 2011.

Despite this apparent stylistic consistency, I am assured that Tatarstan’s new public spaces are not made to match the tastes of Fishman-Bekmambetova or the brigade of creative young urbanites that make up her team. The most important thing about Tatarstan’s new parks and squares, Fishman-Bekmambetova relentlessly emphasises, is that they are built on the basis of an extensive programme of public consultations. “In distinction to what happens in Moscow, we involve a maximum quantity of stakeholders into consultations from the very beginning. The built space itself is less of an achievement than the social process which led to it.”

Where did Tatarstan’s drive towards top-down participation and sustainable blagoustroistvo begin? According to several of my interlocutors in Kazan, the process began in the mid-2000s, as the city was celebrating its millennium and preparing for the Universal Athletics Championships. The Republic’s authorities were determined to prettify the dilapidated urban fabric of the capital, as well as to construct grandiose new monuments and symbols — among these, the dominant Qolşärif Mosque and the Palace of Farmers. During this time, Tatarstan’s Ministry of Construction was led by Marat Khusnullin, who is now Moscow’s Deputy Mayor for Construction, and, according to many accounts, the city’s most powerful (and most corrupt) politician.

Until the mid-2010s, however, politicians’ understandings of urban improvement were more or less limited to grandiose sacral or bureaucratic edifices. The real shift, Guzel Faizrakhmanova tells me, followed the death of Tatarstan President Rustam Minikhanov’s son in an aviation accident in 2013. En route to pay respects in the cemetery adjacent to Kazan’s Gorky Park, Minikhanov was struck by the dilapidated condition of what was once one of the green lungs of the capital. Thus, the President simply decided to renovate the park. At this stage, Faizrakhmanova says, there was no notion of public consultation, either here or anywhere else in Russia. “The President simply decreed that the park has to be renovated and so they started to renovate it.”

Let me come back to the notion of top-down participation — what we might call “vertical horizontalism”. Many people in Tatarstan, even among the implementers and fellow-travellers of blagoustroistvo, are quite scathing about Fishman-Bekmambetova, Snigireva’s, and Smirnov’s exercises in mass participation. “I was a huge fan of this idea two or three years ago, but now I’m much more sceptical,” Guzel Faizrakhmanova says. On one hand, the problem is that professionals get ignored. “Natalia Lvovna [Fishman-Bekmambetova] walks around and talks to every babushka, discusses where to put this or that bench… and when the architect comes over and says something from a professional point of view, Natalia Lvovna tells them, ‘oh, go and shut up, get out of here, you spiteful provincials.’”

So where, ultimately, does the impulse for all of this prettification of public space come from? In Faizrakhmanova’s assessment, “it’s a programme by the authorities to attract the electorate. These are not such huge expenditures: it’s not the renovation of homes, which requires massive resources that Tatarstan does not want to spend. People have turned to parks — they get pleasant public spaces where you can wander and distract yourself from politics.”

Neither is Dmitry Smirnov from Project Group 8 under any illusions about the purity of the studio’s actions. “To cut the story short,” he says, “Russia finds itself in deep shit, because it doesn’t understand how to make its citizens happy.” Imperial posturing only goes so far. There is no money and no time (not in the context of electoral cycles, at least) to carry out a total replacement of infrastructure, of asphalt, schools, and hospitals. “So, the [Russian] Federation came up with this idea to busy itself with parks and squares, laying paving stones, putting up benches. The social effect is quick. This is why the country has recently decided to get on with blagoustroistvo on a federal level.”

Of course, says Smirnov, it’s a little sad to think that everything they’re doing is so nakedly part of the government’s electoral strategy. But then, as one colleague of Smirnov’s in Orenburg (which is also undergoing a blagoustroistvo drive, albeit a less extensive one than Kazan) put it, “elections will come and go. People will walk around [the city] and they won’t give two hoots whether it was done for the elections or not. We have to do it [blagoustroistvo] well; what difference does it make what sauce we cover it with?”

The author would like to express sincere thanks to Aygul Ashrafullina, without whose expertise and guidance this article would not have been researched or written.