DEVELOPING THE GENERAL PLAN FOR SVERDLOVSK IN THE 1930S: PROBLEMS AND FEATURES

The article considers developing a master plan for the city of Sverdlovsk during the period of the prewar five-year plans, when the active industrial development of the adjacent territories began. Architects and urban planners were faced with the task of regulating the order of building, integrating the satellites into a single city system and creating the foundation of the city’s systematic development in the future. However, the lack of funds and skills, as well as changing plans for the national economy’s development led to the fact that work on the general plan dragged on for more than a decade. Construction in the absence of the plan led to a significant expansion of the city due to the emergence of workers’ settlements and towns remote from the historic center and the main urban areas, and identified the lack of a unified system in the ensemble of the central part of the city as well. The article describes the major steps of drafting the territorial distribution schemes and the city’s general plan in the 1930s, as well as the expert assessment of these works by the People’s Commissariat of Communal Services of the RSFSR, the Union of Soviet Architects and regional specialists. Despite the fact that the city’s general plan developed by the end of the 1930s has not been implemented due to the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, the specifics of deploying design works during the studied period determined the vector of development of Sverdlovsk for many decades.