THE PROPHYLAXIS OF THE CITY

Konstantin Melnikov, ‘Green City’, 1930

In [SA] n.1/2, 1930, Barsch and Ginzburg wrote:
 “When a man becomes sick, he can be cured with adequate medicines. It would however be more productive and less expensive to avoid illness manifesting itself. Just in this consists the socialist medicine: prophylaxis. When the city is ugly, when namely it is what it is, with all its attributes: noise, dust, lack of light, air sun, etc., we draw on medicines: homes and villas in the country, health resorts, rest homes, green cities. All this is medicine, a medicine which is necessary when a city exists, which we cannot avoid. But we cannot close our eyes in front of this double system of poison and antidote, which is the classical capitalist system of contradictions.  This system must be contrasted by the socialist system of prophylaxis, the system of the elimination of the city, with all its specific attributes, promoting a settlement sodality of man able to solve the problems of work, of rest, of his culture, as a whole and uninterrupted process of socialist being.” 

During the socialism in the Soviet Union many utopian ideas for the city planning had been proposed. These ideas were to reproduce the revolutionary society of Soviet Union which was totally different from the capitalism city planning.

One of these proposals was the idea of ‘disurbanism’, the design of a dispersed city  between urban and rural life. The architects designed modular buildings distributed along infrastructural viability axes determined by the location of productive facilities.  Mikhail Barsch and Moisei Ginzburg on 1930 proposed the transfer of public enterprises into external locations, the transformation of the freed-up spaces into parks and the dispersion of Moscow citizens along the roads, linking the city with the rural population. Along the different proposals for Moscow another one was Konstantin Melnikov’. He designed a new radical system for Moscow where electric trains could distribute the workers along the city. He also designed a laboratory of sleep where workers could rest from their daily labor. According to his beliefs sleep was the most important part of regeneration of workers and he proposed to redesign the city according to that idea.

How would the center of Moscow look if the above Utopia would become a reality? As the years pass political and socioeconomic changes occur. However, the major problem associated with the residence of the growing number of citizens remain. How are we going rebuild our cities in order to create a better place for living? How are we going to decongest the city centers from millions of people that reside in them?