Residents of Gubkinskoye, working together with experts in urbanism, developed conceptual ideas for their city’s development
22 march 2023
Urban Renovations, an organization with nationwide presence, visited Gubkinsky to put on a project workshop titled Leaders of Change and a Youth Park forum. Workshop participants who were working under the guidance of guest experts came up with several great ideas for transforming local urban spaces, one of which will be implemented in May 2023 as part of the city cleanup effort. The Youth Park forum was dedicated to the development of a project intended to improve the eponymous park in the Purpe neighborhood. These activities were supported by SIBUR's Formula for Good Deeds social investment program.
The workshop was part of the intensive educational program titled Leaders of Change, whose participants had had a chance to attend a series of webinars held earlier. The project workshop featured an effort by three motivated teams each consisting of six to eight participants who managed to put to good use the knowledge they had acquired at the webinars and develop their own conceptual ideas for the improvement of several urban areas.
Nikolay Novikov, head of the Architectural and Urban Planning Department at Urban Renovations, explained that the city’s residents will finalize their projects with the support of Urban Renovations during the final part of the intensive educational program and will present them to the experts.
One of the projects will get implemented as soon as the end of this spring. The city’s residents will be able to submit proposals developed as part of the Leaders of Change educational program to the proactive budgeting project Comfortable Yamal as early as next year, Novikov noted.
Another event of comparable significance for the future of Gubkinsky's development was the Youth Park forum attended by more than 130 caring local citizens. Local residents, representatives of local urban communities and experts’ groups came up with a terms of reference document for designing and developing a conceptual idea for improving the Youth Park in the Purpe neighborhood. In a month’s time, interim public discussions of the design are scheduled to take place, providing an opportunity to see the result of the work done by the forum’s participants and architects from Urban Renovations. The finalized design will be submitted to the All-Russian Contest of Best Architectural Designs for Creating a Comfortable Urban Environment and, if it wins, will get implemented.
The activities that got carried out during the forum came in three different formats: a design game called My Youth Park, the Experts’ Opinion project workshop, and the Open Talk focus group. The design game was an opportunity for city residents to work in groups developing proposals for functional zoning of the park and to present their ideas to the project’s experts and to fellow participants. In the course of the workshop, all participating youths as well as social workers and representatives of government agencies were divided into three groups of experts whereupon each of them got assigned a specific topic to work on including a list of activities to carry out at that location, the meaning and uniqueness of a given space, synching up the project with adjacent areas, developing an infrastructure for younger people, and incorporating the needs of the younger people in the plans for further park development. At the focus group meet, the residents had a discussion with a sociologist to help them most accurately formulate and relay their questions and wishes as regards continued development of the park and of the city in general.
There were a lot of ideas, suggestions and conceptual proposals flying around. The best of them will form the basis of the park’s future design that will be presented at the nationwide contest. I was delighted to see that there are so many active and caring residents in the Purpe neighborhood. I got once again convinced that we are one big and friendly team all sharing a common goal of making our beloved city even more comfortable and better, Andrey Garanin, the Mayor of the city of Gubkinsky, wrote on his personal VKontakte page.