At the parliamentary hearings held on August 27, public activists, experts, and city council members deemed the draft Kyiv General Plan 2025 unacceptable. The main complaints were the unfounded nature of the general plan's indicators, the conflict between many of its provisions and the city's interests, and the change in the designated use of land plots solely to benefit developers. This document clearly cannot be submitted for approval by the Kyiv City Council. After all, the developers have long since turned the process into an endless charade, allowing them to misappropriate budget funds under the guise of continually amending the plan and concealing their responsibility for widespread violations in urban planning.
The parliamentary hearings on Kyiv's new draft general plan for 2025, held on August 27 in the columned hall of the Kyiv City State Administration, failed to generate any excitement among Kyiv residents. Fewer than a hundred participants attended. As a KV correspondent reported, neither Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko nor his deputies from the state administration, responsible for the areas outlined in the draft general plan, bothered to show up. Even Kyiv City Council members largely ignored the event—less than two dozen of the 120 members attended throughout the day.
The rest, obviously, found more significant events that day for strengthening their pre-election image than discussing the city's urban development constitution.
However, it's difficult to accuse the deputies of short-sightedness, given the format of the hearings. Holding them entails no consequences, as Kyiv residents saw for themselves at the end of May. As KV reported, the first parliamentary hearings in ten years were advertised with great fanfare, but in reality, the public was given the opportunity to let off steam by surrounding the presiding mayor with protest slogans and shouting a few angry remarks at him. However, Kyiv residents never saw any practical results from the hours-long discussion of the capital's urban problems.
But apparently even Vitali Klitschko, accustomed to taking a beating in the ring, was too embarrassed by such a clear demonstration of his rapidly evaporating electoral support. So, last Thursday, Kyiv City Council Secretary Oleksiy Reznikov (UDAR-Solidarity faction), Serhiy Tselovalnyk, Director of the Kyiv City State Administration's Department of Urban Development and Architecture, and Serhiy Bronevitsky, head of the Kyiv General Plan Institute, the municipal organization that is developing the document presented, took the helm in his place.
Serhiy Tselovalnik defended the need to approve Kyiv's general plan through 2025 at the hearings. He offered nothing new, other than arguments he's already reiterated a hundred times. He claimed that the current general plan through 2020 is already outdated and practically unfeasible; its projected indicators are significantly underestimated, and many of them have already been exceeded long before 2020. However, the draft of the new general plan for 2025 was supposedly developed with consideration of both transport infrastructure development and the demographic situation, and all of this was based on the most up-to-date data.
However, this fairy tale was refuted by Kyiv City Council member Serhiy Levada (UDAR-Solidarity faction), who heads the parliamentary working group that spent over a year studying the draft new general plan. According to him, the developers completely lacked an economic justification for the measures included in the document, and the data was five years out of date.
"When I asked what indicators were used to calculate it, I received the answer: 2010 indicators. What can we talk about after that?" Mr. Levada was indignant.
Speaking at the hearings, advocates for the 2025 General Plan attempted to present the document as the result of the titanic efforts of countless specialists. They reported numerous changes to the project based on public and expert input. Tatyana Nechayeva, Deputy Head of Regulatory and Methodological Issues at the Kyiv General Plan Institute, explained that approximately a thousand letters from Kyiv residents had been processed, leading to, for example, a reduction in the projected volume of housing construction by a third, to 22 million square meters, while the number of kindergartens had been increased, and is now planned to increase by 1,4 times.
Meanwhile, the draft general plan, for example, reduced the number of proposed road tunnels from six to two. It's unclear, however, how they will be financed, given that the 2025 general plan still includes the Podilsko-Voskresensky Bridge, the metro line to Troyeshchyna, and numerous transport interchanges, some of which appear to be a complete waste of money. For example, a new interchange is planned near the Beresteyska metro station, which is home to a park area, and construction will be hampered by the intersection of three levels of transport: the highway, the metro, and the railway.
According to Hryhoriy Melnychuk, co-coordinator of the Kyiv Urbanism Council, the master plan's developers are attempting to address transportation issues based on a map from the 1980s, boldly adding new road sections and transportation hubs where traffic bottlenecks arise. There's no mention of adjusting the transportation plan and building new thoroughfares—for example, extending Belorusskaya Street near Lukyanovskaya Square, where the planned housing development is guaranteed to create new traffic flows.
This is unsurprising, since the years-long development of the general plan have boiled down to the authors endlessly shuffling the same deck of cards, each time citing "the wishes of the working people" as justification for the latest changes. Meanwhile, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. While officials report on the development of green zones in the project, changes are being made to the 2025 general plan, for example, that simultaneously cut into several highways the Belichansky Forest.
"This will lead to increased exhaust emissions, more vehicles entering the forest, disruption of natural animal migration routes, and ultimately the destruction of the biocenosis. And this is happening after the presidential decree included the Belichansky Forest in the territory of the Holosiivsky National Park," notes Veronika Ageyeva, chair of the "For Belichansky Forest!" initiative.
The increase in green space, so boasted by the developers of the new general plan, also turned out to be a rigged plan. It turns out there are no plans to change the total area of green space, and the increase in the number of squares and recreational areas was achieved by simply repainting the city map in different shades of green.
"I analyzed the tables: the 2020 general plan lists 5,2 hectares of recreational land and 10 hectares of forests, while the 2025 general plan lists 8,7 hectares of recreational land and 6,5 hectares of forests. In other words, the recreational zone is expanding at the expense of forests," explains Viktor Gleba, former deputy chief architect of Kyiv.
The only thing that remains constant in the reshaping of the capital's theoretical future is the attempt to legitimize controversial land allocations through the new general plan, including those that sparked fierce public confrontations with developers. For example, a plot of land at 28 General Zhmachenko Street was rezoned from a recreational zone to a residential and public development zone. Particularly telling in this case is the fact that back in 2011, when the "gangster regime" triumphed in Kyiv, this plot was included in the draft 2025 general plan as part of a green zone.
It's also noteworthy that the costs of the 2025 General Plan activities for the first five-year period are estimated at $28 billion. Given the city's annual budget of approximately $1 billion, this figure is enough to evoke a sad smile. Naturally, the draft General Plan 2025 does not include any detailed calculations, ratios, or the role of city budgets, state funds, investment funds, grants, and loans in funding these projects.
It's therefore unsurprising that the general plan, with its constantly changing and plucked-from-the-air indicators, appears unfeasible and unacceptable. This worried virtually everyone present at the parliamentary hearings, except the developers. After all, they had already successfully spent 16 million hryvnias of budgetary funds and were obviously eager to contribute, at public expense, the next round of comments and corrections to the project. Speakers brought them one after another to Oleksiy Reznikov, who carefully filed them in the presidium. At the end of the hearings, Reznikov noted that the deputies could transform all these proposals into draft City Council resolutions for consideration by the relevant committees.
Indeed, they can transform it. Or they can choose not to – that's up to the manager. Moreover, these draft decisions will only make sense once the 2025 General Plan is submitted to the Kyiv City Council for review. It's worth noting that no one is rushing to add it to the agenda yet. But no one is stopping the Kyiv General Plan Institute from continuing to add or cross out objects on the multi-colored map.
It's clear that the development of the 2025 General Plan has long since become a continuous process of improvements and revisions, with no end in sight. The developers' attitude toward the document is clearly evident from its title alone, which, for four years, they haven't bothered to correct a glaring omission. After all, according to the 2011 law "On the Regulation of Urban Development," general plans for populated areas are indefinite, and therefore this document can't be limited to 2025 or any other year. However, who cares about such trivialities when so much remains to be finalized at the expense of the budget?
And it's not just about the constant embezzlement of budget funds by officials and architects close to the purse strings. And it's not even about the maintenance of a staff of parasites at the "Kyiv General Plan Institute," which, if the current general plan is taken as a guide and declared permanent, would only have to be disbanded.
By developing a new general plan and denying the legitimacy of the current one, employees of the Kyiv General Plan Institute and officials of the Kyiv City State Administration's urban development department are evading responsibility for violations that, with their tacit (and perhaps not always unpaid) consent, have been allowed to occur in urban development for at least the past decade.
"The developers of the new general plan are the same people who systematically destroyed the old general plan. They were supposed to monitor it, defend its provisions, identify violations, and sound the alarm. Instead, they participated in corruption," asserts Natalia Novak, a member of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction.
And, perhaps most importantly, in the thirteen years since the 2020 General Plan was implemented, the mayor's office has failed to conduct the inventory of Kyiv's lands called for in that document, nor has it created a full-fledged urban development cadastre, replacing it with a pathetic parody in which the boundaries of land parcels, not delineated in nature, overlap each other, and information about the owners of the land and buildings is simply absent.
It seems that fear of liability, especially criminal liability, is holding officials back from analyzing the implementation of the current 2020 General Plan. Although this would be a logical step to begin developing a new strategic document: assessing which projects have been implemented and which haven't, and why, which indicators are outdated and to what extent, and which remain relevant. But such work will inevitably reveal specific steps taken by specific officials on the thorny path of distributing municipal land. Therefore, it's simpler and safer to declare that Kyiv "effectively has no general plan." And without a general plan, there are no violations.
For Kyiv, this situation means continued chaos in urban development policy and the absence of a coherent strategy for urban infrastructure development. Formally, in accordance with the Law "On the Regulation of Urban Development Activity," the 2020 General Plan will remain in effect indefinitely. As Sergei Levada noted, the legislation lacks a mechanism for invalidating such documents. In reality, it will continue to be ignored. However, if by some incredible miracle the 2025 General Plan is finally finalized and adopted, its provisions will suffer the same fate. Because impunity for officials will remain the norm. Because the year the city's development strategy is valid for and the colors used for specific land plots aren't so important. What matters is who will implement this strategy and what interests they will pursue.
Kyiv City Hall, boasting of its latest Bonaparte-style plans, likes to point at large Western cities, both appropriately and inappropriately. But New York City, for example, is still developing according to a master plan adopted back in 1811. This hasn't prevented it from successfully developing and doesn't force the municipality to develop new strategies every five years. And yet, for some reason, pubs and helipads aren't sprouting up in Manhattan's Central Park, thirty-story glass candles aren't being added to Lincoln Center under the guise of renovation, and homeless people aren't camping out in the Metropolitan Opera House, regularly starting fires there.
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