Ekaterina Konovalova and Agatha Kurik, first-year master's students at the Faculty of Architecture, made presentations at the "Trialogue with the City. The Greenth of March".
The event was organized by the St Petersburg Union of Designers and the Center for the Development of a Comfortable Urban Environment to bring together specialists and the professional community to discuss urban greening.
Agatha Kurik
Agatha Kurik, who devoted several term papers and her final thesis to beneficial insects, made a presentation on this topic. According to the student, the problem of the green frame in the city is very relevant, but the use of chemicals in the course of its creation and care of plants can negatively affect the urban biodiversity. As an alternative, Agatha suggested attracting beneficial insects to help with pest control.
This is not Agatha’s first participation in the “Trialogue with the City” event, which was held for the third time: in 2021, Agatha gave a report on the landscaping of Ufimskaya Street with the attraction of beneficial insects - then the exposition brought together projects completed by students of the Department of Architectural Environment Design for the Petrogradsky District. The landscaping project for Ufimskaya Street was developed according to the wishes of the citizents, who drew attention to the mass death of bumblebees after mowing the grass. This approach paid off: the Committee for the Improvement of St Petersburg became interested in the initiative. As part of the summer practice and after the SPbGASU teachers participated in the round table on lawn maintenance, the project was recommended for implementation and brought by graduates to working documentation.
The Trialogue also presented projects completed as part of the summer practice for the flower decoration of the highways of St Petersburg in 2021 and the winning concept of the competition of the city government "Alexandrovsky Park - the green ring of St Petersburg" in 2017. In order to attract more professional attention to projects and increase the chances of implementing them, the authors demonstrate their landscape ideas at such events, becoming participants in professional discussions. SPbGASU students also took part in organizing the event: master student Pavel Ostapchuk provided technical support, and Konstantin Alekseev was responsible for photo and video shooting.
Ekaterina Konovalova
In her third year, Ekaterina Konovalova also dealt with the restoration of the flora and fauna of Ufimskaya Street, and she devoted her final qualifying work to the improvement of Vorontsovsky Park. In this work, she developed the theme of biodiversity and proposed to attract birds by creating unique conditions for them with the means and techniques of the landscape.
Vorontsovsky Park in the South-West of St Petersburg is popular with local residents and is well known to Ekaterina. Therefore, when the Committee for the Improvement of the St Petersburg Government proposed a list of PGS territories for graduation projects, the student chose it. (PGS - public green space: a publicly accessible area for recreational use or having recreational potential.)
The landscape object is included in the water-green frame of the Kirovsky district of St Petersburg. The water-green frame is a link between the green areas of the city, from small courtyards and miniparks to forest parks, which passes through all urban areas and synthesizes the bulk of the oxygen necessary for the natural functioning of the ecosystem, increasing biodiversity in the urban environment. Such green and water arteries permeate the city and go beyond it, thereby providing a connection with nature untouched by man.
The pre-project analysis of the territory included photographic fixation and visual assessment, the study of environmental conditions at the design site, the study of soil-climatic and anthropogenic factors, existing plantings, and the architectural and urban background.
For each ecological niche, Ekaterina thought out a tree and shrub composition that satisfies ecological and decorative factors. For the pedestrian promenade, a constant-flowering shrub mixborder is proposed: this is a complex flower garden, which is created from multi-tiered plantings that ensure continuous flowering from early spring to late autumn. For playgrounds - a corner composition that serves as a shield from the wind. Modular landscaping acts as backstage in the alley part of the park. The modular approach to creating a design allows to reduce the time when designing and landscaping a site, since the developed universal composition, in this case, square modules, can be used on fragments of the territory with similar conditions. For landscaping the coastal zone, an "English" landscape garden has been proposed, worked out to the shades of the plants used. In the landscaping of the coastal zone, it is proposed to use plants with a developed root system that can strengthen the banks of reservoirs.
Ekaterina is sure that birds bring great benefits to the urban environment: they destroy insect pests, weak and sick animals that spread infectious diseases, transfer organic matter between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, pollinate and help to settle plants. Therefore, in each of the landscape zones there are "hotels" for nesting birds (wooden birdhouses). Houses for insects and birds are usually called "hotels" in the projects of French designers. Among them is Philippe Clerjot, professor of ecology at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris: his lecture “Trees in the city. Biodiversity and Urbanism”, organized for students of SPbGASU in February 2022, influenced the work of Ekaterina Konovalova. In general, unity with the surrounding world, natural materials, curved contours, open space in the form of a lawn, a warm palette of plantings, a play with volumes create a sophisticated corner of nature inside a big city in Vorontsovsky Park.
The student believes that the creation of a unified and connected system of green spaces has a positive impact on urban infrastructure, promotes biodiversity by attracting insects and birds. The increase in landscaping and its introduction into the elements of the urban environment helps to solve urban environmental problems.
“Such public performances serve as the first step towards the implementation of the project. It is important not to postpone the work done, but to declare it and be open to a “trialogue” with the public, designers and municipal workers,” Ekaterina noted at the end of her speech.
According to Alexander Trofimov, Deputy Chairman of the St Petersburg Union of Designers, the event opened up completely new directions for the formation of professional competencies of specialists trained by SPbGASU and the prospects for the work of the environmental design section to develop the green frame of St Petersburg for the benefit of the city and for the health of its inhabitants.
