Regularities of Creating in the XVIII - Mid XX Centuries a Regular Agglomeration of St. Petersburg - Leningrad and Problems of its Preservation as a World Heritage Object

Abstract

Before the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703, there had for centuries existed a developed system of rural settlements located on the flat valleys and areas along the Neva River and around the Ladoga Lake. Since 1703, under the leadership of Peter I and his followers, there was carried out a systematic creation of the capital St. Petersburg agglomeration (St. Petersburg and residential suburbs around it), which was done on the basis of purposefully introduced principles of regularity and harmony of architectural ensembles, by the methods of large-scale reconstruction of the previous irregular system of the population settlement distribution. The scale of this new agglomeration had no analogues in world town-planning practice of the XVIII century and united spaces with the total area over 200 square kilometers, which extended from the town of Sestroretsk in the North to the town of Novgorod in the South, from the town of Narva in the West to the Volkhov River in the East. The regularity and multi-center character of the central city formed according to the pattern of a mesh and cellular structure (with the dimensions of 10 km by 15 km), was supplemented with a regularity of suburban ensembles` layout and multi-kilometer rectilinear axes – roads connecting them. Some of the roads had the length of several hundred km (such as the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg built in 1706-1718, that was as long as nearly 700 km). Huge suburban forest-park and natural-landscape spaces between palace and park ensembles were united as star-patterned compositions. This historically created agglomeration is deservedly included in the List of Objects of the World Heritage, but so far it has not received a unambiguous understanding of its uniqueness and needs a considerable effort in searching new individual ways of the historical heritage preservation. On the basis of the archive records, the contribution presents an analysis of regularities of consecutive and purposeful transformation of the historical rural settlements system existing up to the foundation of St. Petersburg into the capital St. Petersburg agglomeration of regular type.