The decision to reduce the maximum permissible height of newly erected buildings in Moscow was made on August 7, 2012 at a meeting of the Moscow government. According to one of the deputy mayors who presented this document, such a measure should bring significant benefits to the city in several aspects at once.
Firstly, it should preserve the most remarkable features of the historically developed landscape of the capital and the recognizability of city skylines. Secondly, by reducing the height of buildings, the city government hopes to reduce or at least slow down the growth in the number of people living or working in the central regions of the metropolis. And this, in turn, should reduce the density of road traffic on the most congested streets.
The document adopted by the metropolitan government is called "On the sectoral scheme of high-rise building restrictions on the territory of the city of Moscow" and sets the maximum height of buildings at 75 m. This is 25 m less than the previous restriction, and now it corresponds to a building height of about 23-25 floors … But setting a new benchmark is not the only outcome of the ruling. After its implementation, each administrative district will have its own detailed maps-schemes of height building restrictions. This should simplify the approval of new projects - now, for the construction of high-rise buildings, designers have to carry out a separate visual landscape analysis each time. And in the near future, each city prefecture will have to place such schemes, created by the Moscow City Architecture Committee, on its website.
However, in the adopted resolution there is also an opportunity to bypass this limitation, moreover, both in the direction of increasing and decreasing the height. The specific value of this parameter can be set individually for the territories falling under the classification of "cultural heritage objects" and "protected zones". And the urban space inside the Garden Ring, according to the capital's mayor Sergei Sobyanin, regardless of the adopted resolution, requires additional study. In addition, the introduced restriction will not apply to projects that are already being implemented.
