Background

The Future City Game took place on 26-27 February 2010 in the School of Self-determination educational centre in the Vostochnoe Izmailovo district. The participants (high-school students, graduates, young teachers, social entrepreneurs, Russian and European experts, representatives of local authorities) were working out a vision of development for Redoubts of Peter the Great – a historical monument to the eighteenth century.

Vostochnoe Izmailovo, where the Redoubts of Peter the Great are located, is a typical residential area on the outskirts of Moscow with some historical background and a fuzzy identity. The well-preserved redoubts  eighteenth century are located in the middle of a large wild park which is used by local reisdents for leisure and sporting activities. Most of the walls and ditches are on the land of a community farm that grows and sells flowers.

Objectives

The municipality initiated the game as a step to attract public attention, and bring together professionals, students and locals to work on developing a vision of the place and then take the ideas forward.

The Future City Game also facilitated multicultural dialogue between the participants, provided for exchanges of experience and created an environment of international and cross-generation communication.

Winning idea

Peter’s Gardens
The winning project considers both the historical and environmental backgrounds of the area. The team suggested creating a flexible recreational zone that both would demonstrate some common patterns of traditional eighteenth century gardens, and also turn the redoubts into an interactive open-air museum showing the fortification arts of the given period, such as redoubts, palisades, poling, trenches etc. One of the key components of the project is to set up a public physics garden with a wide range of possible scientific and entertaining activities for all ages.

The main advantages of the project are it uses the facilities of an already existing community farm, creating a flexible space for festivals, historical reconstructions and environmental events celebrating the innovations Peter implemented, and a low start-up budget.

Winning ideas from the other teams

Folk festival grounds
The team suggested a complex platform for folk celebrations. The tree-shaped map of the project considers a number of possible ways of gradually developing the area into a place with a strong reference to the time of Peter the Great. The team’s action plan ranges from very low-budget eco-trails and seasonal weekend sport and leisure folk activities for the local community to a full-scale location for historical role plays, school theatre festival stages and an interactive webpage which allows you to explore the historical period, listen to educational podcasts and find a schedule for offline activities on the location.


The Edge project
The idea is to provide visitors with an opportunity to touch things and work with their hands. The team emphasises the need to attract people and promote the area.
The team offered to create workshops for handicrafts with the tools of 18th century and gardening. An interesting component of the project is a summer camping area as a part of seasonal handicraft village. This is especially innovative, as Moscow lacks cheap accommodation and there are almost no camping areas for backpackers.


Peter the Great Village
The team presented a project that focuses on creating an art workshop village where visitors can observe the procedures of traditional handicrafts and try some themselves. Among other activities, there might be cooking, glass-blowing, weaving, joinery, forging, embroidery etc., all of which could be done in or light pavilions which could also be in historical styles. The village would be surrounded by a walking and cycling circumferential path which might also serve as a traditional sledge or horse- riding route.
Probably the most futuristic and high-tech idea of the game came from this team - it describes an open-air, virtual 3D labyrinth transmitted by laser projector to the redoubts, which are quite a maze themselves. The presentation of the team showed the idea of two worlds, the one underground demonstrating archaeological digs, and the one above, an interactive simulation of the related period.


Military Camp
The team took military innovations and the story of the Entertainment Regiment in particular as inspiration. Peter was the first in Russia to develop professional military training, which included both physical and intellectual exercise. The project suggests using the Redoubts and surrounding land as a field for simulating role-plays of military training for schoolchildren and, potentially, for all ages. Besides sporting events, there might be seasonal interactive workshops with military-related activities with an opportunity for visitors to take what they have made home as a souvenir.