The road to the project City of Access you are about to read started for me in January 2012 with the series of articles for the studio Microrayon Factbook. But it actually started in the mid 1950s with the beginning of a massive housing campaign when byt1 became the main concern of the state government and an extraordinary degree of attention and time was devoted to reshaping everyday living. Planners thought about how life

in the new environment would be organized, focusing on what could be done to make it better, easier and more comfortable for the new residents.

However, over time many of the introduced concepts failed for various reasons and some of the concepts stayed only on paper. This research for the Factbook got me thinking whether some aspects of the planned lifestyle should and can be reactivated now and in the microrayons of the future and what is actually going on in the everyday lives of people in the microroayon today.

Therefore in order for these concerns to be answered I turned away from the historical perspective and archival research and became focused on qualitative research as aninvestigation of todays daily practices in Moscow microrayons’. By taking fieldtrips to different microrayons of the city: Strogino, Cheremushki, Mar’ino etc and carrying out observation and interviews with the residents, I tried to understand whether microrayon space

creates an opportunity for people or limits it? I questioned how people manipulate, re-appropriate, make and take up microrayon spaces in order to meet their needs? What people do in microrayon on daily bases and how these activities relate to one another spatially? An attempt to answer these questions was presented with the help of an activity cycle USE that was a snapshot of the various existing and emerging daily life practices in Moscow microrayons. It identified the occurring process in everyday lives of the residents and current problems. It appeared from this exercise that a lot of problems and inconveniences are connected to peoples inability or unwillingness to communicate and share with each other not only thoughts but spaces, services and things. There is no more free space for people, relationships, and experiences. Over the years we built a hard shell in the microrayon that led to social exclusion and spatial separation of millions of people that are stuck in the cages of high-rise apartment blocks. Microrayon today appears to be “a river which collects urban energies linked to daily lives and pushes them towards individualism and fragmentations which, at times, explode”. At home we trapped ourselves behind two metal doors and appointed a concierge downstairs to secure ourselves from the “outside intrusion” and the “real life” that is usually somewhere outside the microrayon. We live in houses where our balconies, closets, garages and sheds are filled with tones of stuff we posses but rarely or never use. Things we own fill up all our spaces and fill up our minds. “We have constructed

a large part of our freedom around our “right to own” and our self-identity around what we do”. Do we need these hard borders between Me and We, Inside and Outside, is erecting walls not sufficient anymore? Why do we spend so much time thinking about stuff we own and things we want to buy: apartments, cars, TV-sets; and forgetting about relationships and interactions with people and spaces?