City Construction
I am impressed by the number of construction projects that are running in the city right now.
The Lakhta Center is a good example of incredible building speed. It is a non-residential construction project, with diverse facilities, including offices, a science center, a hotel, conference halls, and its main function, the headquarter of Gazprom. It is promised to become the highest building of Russia and Europe.
Everything appears to be going according to the schedule. In then months, the building has grown from zero to 150 meters, touching this point in June 2016. In the last seven months, the building has grown an additional hundred meters.
And it is not only the building that is developing. There is a lot of work in progress in the field of transport development and embellishment of the center’s surroundings. Originally, the building site was planned directly next to the historical center of Petersburg, but relocated to Lakhta, on the edge of the city.
But not everything goes according to its planning in the construction sector in Petersburg. A widely known and contentious example is the new Zenit Arena, that is being built on Krestovskiy Ostrov. Its budget has been exceeded several times – the estimated 6,7 billion rubles turned out to be 48 billion – and the stadium was planned to be completed by December 2008. I saw it is almost finished.
Also, in the upcoming five years, fifteen new metro stations should be opened. This includes extra stations on the ends of the purple, green and orange line – with Teatralnaya on the orange line, near the Marinsky Theatre – but also a completely new sixth line. They have chosen to give the line a brown color, maybe because this is the color you get if you mix all the other colors.
Besides these rather exceptional projects, the city is busy building new housing all the time. The list of projects is impressive. It includes projects with more than a million square meters of living space, for tens of thousands of residents. The last ten years, millions of square meters have been built, mainly on the edge of the city.
Recently I heard about an urban development and housing project behind the Moscow Station. It strongly differs from the entire historical center of the city. It is a complete change of style and will not remind you of Petersburg in any way. That such a place exists in the middle of the city is quite interesting. Its appearance is very modern and has a sleek design.
Near Parnas metro station, at the end of the blue line, there is being worked on the Northern Valley (Северная Долина). It concerns a large scale construction project of living space, with a living space surface of 2,7 million square meters, destined for 80 thousand inhabitants. It is not only a bundle of flats, but an entire micro region. It includes schools, kindergartens, policlinics, clubs, a cinema, a banya, a swimming pool, fitness clubs. It is hard to imagine that in the term of ten years, an entire minicity is being built. I was curious what it would like, so took the metro to Parnas last weekend and have to admit I was as impressed by its realization as its plans. The amount of high rise building is impressive, and it appeared to me that one could live there, without ever leaving the area, since everything is within easy reach. If you would like to see what such a micro region looks like, Северная Долина is literally to be found next to Parnas metro station.
