Nyagan’s residents chose a location for the city’s new public garden and shared their ideas for improving their city

5 april 2022

Nyagan hosted SIBUR-sponsored preparations for putting together an application entry with the All-Russian Contest of the Best Projects for Creating a Comfortable Urban Environment. The contest is open to towns with a population of up to 100,000. Its winners will receive funding for implementing their urban landscaping projects. Nyagan intends to landscape a public garden in the vicinity of the Yunost Culture Center.

The location for the upcoming beautification project was picked by the city’s residents themselves. Most of them believe that it is the area adjacent to the Yunost Culture Center that is in dire need of getting landscaped. The residents are intent on converting the bare piece of land there into a manicured public garden.

As part of preparations for implementing this beautification project, March 24 and 25 saw Nyagan hold a local forum where the city’s inhabitants discussed their ideas and took part in developing the project. The forum was conducted by designers and researchers representing Urban Renovations, an NGO that is involved in implementing the project with the support of SIBUR's Formula for Good Deeds social investment program.

The Nyagan Changes forum included a design session attended by more than 50 Nyagan’s residents. Its participants had developed proposals for functional zoning and components of the content that will be offered at the future public garden. This was followed by a workshop, the second event of the forum, attended by 20 city experts including ethnographers, representatives of business, the city’s administration, and of local communities. Each group offered their ideas on how to develop this plot of land based on their own assessments. As an example, local entrepreneurs discussed how to improve the attractiveness of this area to investments and what goods and services could be relevant to the residents of the area under development.

In addition, to see this area through the eyes of local children, a modeling Dream City contest of mockups was arranged for Nyagan's schoolchildren. The five teams that took part in the contest used miniature mockups to show what this area might look like after its renovation.

As part of preparing the city’s application for the contest it was important to carry out a full-scale survey of the area to help understand the nature of the landscape of the location in question in particular and of the city as a whole, while taking into account its historical and cultural features and opinions of Nyagan's residents. The project’s designers visited the city’s other prominent urban spaces in order to ensure that they can properly blend the new public garden with the overall style of the city and integrate it into the city’s complex urban infrastructure.

Sustainable development of any city is only possible through collaboration with all interested parties: the city’s authorities, local businesses and communities. That's why an important objective of the Formula for Good Deeds program is to involve local citizens in positive transformations. As a result of these two days of intensive work we managed to create more than 20 different maps, layouts and functional zoning schemes that will help our architects create a truly unique and relevant design of the city’s new public garden should they end up winning the contest, Sergey Vinokhodov, Advisor to the Director General of SiburTyumenGaz, noted.

One can follow the progress with the project’s implementation on social networks by clicking here.