On November 21, the IV annual Comfort City conference organized by the Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning of Moscow, the program of the conference by RTDA (with the participation of the General Plan Institute of Moscow) was held at the Artplay design center, Moscow.

This year, the main topics of discussion were: renovation, development of industrial areas and psychological comfort of city residents.

The moderator of the first session, devoted to the creation of a comfortable urban environment during the renovation of industrial areas, was Elena Popova, the Head of the Urban Planning Research Department of RTDA. The experts discussed the development prospects of non-residential areas of the city.

During the second session, moderated by the Chief Architect of RTDA Dina Dridze, experts discussed such an interesting and controversial topic as “psychological comfort in the city”. It turned out that some people understand the psychological comfort as privacy, peace and closeness to nature, while others, on the contrary, need dense development and vivid city life in all its diversity. Therefore, urban planners have a difficult task - to provide residents with the very diversity that ensures comfortable living for each resident of the city. Also, during the dialogue of experts with the guests of the conference, it turned out that architects and city managers should pay more attention to sociological research in the development of urban planning projects (the so-called forecast-social design) and to restore the lost relationship between sociology and architecture.

The organizer managed to fulfill one of the main objectives of the conference: to identify the most acute issues of the city, to draw attention to them and discuss solutions in the format of an open dialogue between architects, officials, entrepreneurs, scientists and residents of the city.