The Reconstruction of Moscow

carried out in the near future make it particularly important to have a fixed plan for the building of the city, since the extensive de\ T elopment of construction in Moscow without a unified plan may extremely com- plicate the life and reorganization of the city in the future." The planning of a Soviet city is a vast and complex undertaking such as no other epoch has contemplated. And indeed can one speak seriously of planning in former epochs at all? The "planners" of the past were either Uto- pians who left us only the outlines of their utopia-cities, without having built anything "in real life," or architects who built various ensembles, for the inost part certain public squares (particularly during the Renaissance), or bourgeois "planners" of the type of the Paris prefect, Haussmann, whose plan followed a horizontal scheme and ignored the height of buildings, i.e., solved only one prob- lem, the movement of traffic — including the riiovement of artillery shells. (As is known, in replanning Paris Hauss- mann chiefly pursued the aim of depriving the workers of the opportunity of building barricades in the crooked and narrow streets which were inaccessible to artillery fire.) Town-"planning" under capitalism can no more be considered actual planning, than the "planning" of an individual enterprise, trust or even entire branch of capi- talist industry can be considered "organized" capitalism. This, of course, does not mean that Soviet town-plan- rting has nothing to learn from the past. On the contrary, there is much that can and must be taken from the rich heritage of the architecture of the past, particularly from the masters of the Renaissance, much that can be learned even from contemporaries, however limited the aims they set themselves. But the Soviet Union approaches this ex-

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