Moscow (12 million people) and its surrounding region – the Moscow Oblast (7 million people) – are two separate and equal entities under the law of the Russian Constitution (1993). Around Moscow, within 50 kilometers-radius, the Moscow Metropolitan Area (MMA) covers around 20 million people. Therefore, since the fall of USSR, its governance is in the hands of two entirely separate administrations.
The last ten years have been crucial for the urban development of the MMA. On June 17, 2011, Russia’s President Dmitriy Medvedev, speaking at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, announced that the city of Moscow would expand spatially, and that federal agencies would relocate to the annexed area. A new international financial district would also rise in the new part of the capital. All these projects reflect the authorities' desire to make Moscow a polycentric city built on a new public transport network (Argenbright, 2013, 2018; Argenbright and al. 2019). In this respect, D. Medvedev instructed Moscow’s mayor Sergey Sobyanin and the governor of Moscow Oblast, Boris Gromov (since 2012 Andrey Vorobiov), to come up with a more complete plan by July 10.
This paper offers an initial evaluation of Moscow's current “metropolitan turn” (Kinossian, 2016) through the study of two megaprojects launched since the presidential announcement:
1) The annexation of 1500 squares kilometer and their urban development (called New Moscow).
2) The development of hundreds of new line/metro stations and five suburban and railroads (called Greater Moscow).
The paper aims to analyse these megaprojects by focusing on their origins, policy content, governance and economic implications. It looks at a series of "disputed territories", governed by two separate administrations, as "local geopolitical laboratories" where the various urban development actors confront each other and promote their respective interests (Subra, 2014).
Mots clés : Governance|Moscow|Metropolitan area|Transport|Geopolitics
A103843VP