Big urban operation

New City Heart

Location: Kaliningrad, Russia
Client: Heart of the City Planning Bureau, Kaliningrad

Program: Concept masterplan for the redevelopment of the largely vacant heart of Kaliningrad

The city center of historic Kaliningrad has been eliminated in and after World War II. Since then it only partially has been redeveloped following socialist planning paradigms, leaving many unfinished or unresolved zones. To understand the place and how local population thinks about it, we have been undertaking extensive study work and interviews. The conclusions of these findings formed the basic design approach.

Rather than engaging in another destruction of the past and ‘grand gesture urbanism of wishful thinking’, the plan proposed adopts an attitude of ‘curated opportunism’. This approach makes the heart of the city the playing field of actual real investment and seeks to make places and different urban scenes using them. The result would be a lively and contemporary place that has the potential to compete in its own market against all the historic cities along the Baltic Sea coast.

Stages:
2014 Concept

Team:
MLA+: Markus Appenzeller, Yana Golubeva, Mikhail Stepura,
UTS