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Lenin 31, Louis Vuitton 3

I was in Moscow last week.  In red square, Moscow, Louis Vuitton was open for business, but Lenin’s mausoleum was closed.  Well capitalism has won after all!

Invited to Moscow by Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, to give a talk on CLES’s work on placemaking and resilience, my visit to Red square was actually an official afternoon off work, doing a bit of sightseeing.  However, I am a distracted ‘tourist’ and it wasn’t long before I was conducting my own little free form research.  Intrigued by what Louis Vuitton was doing in Red Square, I thought I would pop in.  A mere 3 ‘customers’ – excluding me.  I then lingered outside, with other tourists at the closed Lenin’s tomb.  In 15 minutes. 31 people went to look at the opening times of the tomb.  Macabre voyeurism is always a hit!

Its my third visit to Moscow and physically, it’s the most imposing city, I have ever been in.  Much more so, than say, New York, or London or even Dubai.  The soviet era buildings are either big mountains, very wide, with great girth, tapering upwards, or low rise lozenges of seemingly endless masonry and concrete.  Each street has imposing apartment blocks, 5/6 story high.  The roads are huge seas of speedy traffic, the bridges stride over rivers.  This physicality is counteracted by the worlds grandest metro, the shopping areas and the bars and cafe’s which are busy and peopled.  Because of the scale of operations outside, these spaces feel intimate.

Within this context, Moscow is a great place to experience a place undergoing speedy and deep societal change.  It’s obviously very different to the UK, but a few thoughts came to mind in my conversations with fellow speakers, the Muscovites and international students and staff at Strelka.

Michael Schindhelm, gave a fascinating talk on the social design and the future of place.  Referring to work of Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The world is flat’, and its critics, he highlighted that capitalism has ‘won’ and old securities and globally historic and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.  However, as we both discussed, there is also a clear need to deal with new differences between the haves and the havenots, and ‘glocalisation’- allowing places to ‘find their unique place’ in this new world.

Because of environmental change and the breakdown of the old securities around the role of state and capitalism, places, are trying to transform, searching for new ways of fairness, community and authenticity.

However, compared to the UK, this quest obviously seems much starker in Russia as the routes they have taken and their future choices are more fundamental.  What you get with Moscow, is the goodness, the badness and the ugliness of capitalism.  On the one hand there is a free spiritedness, and almost a hedonism.  Sometimes we forget in the UK how free and lucky some of us are, and what the possibilities of a flat world can bring us.  We are also maybe too often waiting for others to do.  This may even be what our big society is about?

However, on the other hand, in the space of 20 years, Russia has went from a state driven society, where ambition was fettered and freedom was squashed, to a form of capitalism, which has too little regulation and which too often favours the few over the many.

Russia’s economy is of course buoyed by natural and finite resources.  However, in a rush to capitalism, many Russians believe that the state industries which exploited these environmental gifts, were sold off far too cheaply and are now being squandered. Moscow has the highest number of billionaires in the world (79), but average wage is something like 37000 Roubles or around £800.

Thus, there us a starkly divided society, where its hard to make ends meet, there are few state safety nets and where luck or who you know, rather than merit will often see you rise.

I left Moscow, with a even greater appreciation of the universal omnipotence and success of capitalism.  However, I was also starkly reminded that the ends must be greater levels of inclusion, fairness, local authenticity and opportunity for all.  In this the national and local state, has a vital role in tempering capitalism’s excesses, with local place making, shielding and shaping a key means.

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