Moscow on the Move

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In 1960, Moscow was a city on the move. The USSR's bustling metropolis, not only was the population of Moscow ever-growing in the post-war period, but the borders themselves were pushing outward, absorbing smaller communities into the greater whole. Between 1960 and today, the population of Moscow has more than doubled, the transit system enormously expanding to match. However, along with this expansion, so have the norms of travel changed as well. Once the domain of few elites, the automobile has become a huge part of the transit culture of Moscow, the road network to accommodate those cars literally paving the way for less individualistic share taxi systems as well. The trams once in vogue for travel in the center have been gradually marginalized as public transit options. The 1960 map shows not only a smaller Moscow, but a Moscow that commuted in fundamentally different ways.

In this exhibit, we will explore both what is on the map and what is not. We will use the 1960 map as a jumping off point to investigate the edges of the mid-century city and their path to central parts of Moscow today. Specifically, our exploration of Moscow commuter culture will center on two developments, just starting to get integrated into the city at the time of the map's production. The Cheriomushki area was part of the major wave of development and expansion of Moscow in a southwesterly direction starting in the 1930s, the first of the grand microraion developments of mid-century Moscow. The Khoroshevo-Mnevniki neighborhood, on the other hand, was a series of villages forged into a mikroraion during the boom of prefabricated development in the 1960s. Looking at these two neighborhoods, we will try to extract the experience of travel in Moscow in the period and what opportunities it brought the residents into the present day.

Moscow on the Move