Strelka VVSR - Seasons in the City and дача

The dynamic and changing character of the social media data was the big topic today. We discussed the different conceptions of time in everyday life, culture, religion, science and society as well as the implications of working with dynamic data in general. Similar the processing programming was focused on the implementation of first sketches of visualisations. However there were a lot of difficulties to be solved surrounding the data as well as the platforms. Especially the clash of the character sets was something that needed to be resolved for every step.

The times here in Russia run a bit different everything is even later than it would be in London. Days stat at mid day lunch doesn't exist and dinner comes in around ten. Almost a 6 hour, quarter of a day shift. At the same time Moscow seems to be very quiet. COming from the busy London streets into a real hot, summery Moscow is like a full stop. Street appear extremely wide for the few cars and crossroads wast. The sort of dimensions you even think twice about crossing even with the green man showing.


Image taken from GoEa Aerial imagery / Datcha housing area around Moscow.

Driving round the centre, Kremlin, makes one wonder where everyone is, where the traffic is. They must be around the corner at the red light and will any second flood the roads around you? No, actually not, there is no one. Summer in Moscow, especially on weekends is quite calm. People prefer to go out to the country side where they ave their 'дача', 'Landhaus', second home, summer house. This seems to be a very strong tradition and this cyclical moving out of the city during the summer period is very popular. An estimated 25% of the families living in urbann areas actually have such a country house.

Also Vladimir Putin has his Dacha, like many of the new Russian elite. However with this boom the tradition changed form the soviet stile garden house buit from wood in to brick and concreet, multy story buildings.


Image taken from GoEa Aerial imagery / Datcha housing area around Moscow.

The popularity shows on the map and vast areas around Moscow and presumably also the other Russian cities are covered with this country style houses. On aerial imagery, from the distance it almost looks a bit similar to allotments. And in fact this is what the house surrounding land was used for a few decades ago. It was one of the main sources for people living in the city for fresh vegetables and similar goods.

The typology is loosely grid based and it seems that only very recently, currently in development, planners have adopted the 'Cul-de-sac', suburban style of layout typology, unfortunately.

Again for the records the presentation: