Protected Areas of Moscow as a Part of Urban Green Infrastructure: Main Gaps of Planning

Nowadays, 118 urban natural protected areas of Moscow occupy more than one fifth of the city territory and are located in urban peripheral areas which appeared within city borders at its expansions in 1960 and 1984. The main stream of creation of protected areas in cities of the former Soviet Union was in 1980s under the accepted concept of natural and ecological framework of a city as the base of its spatial organization. Formally, the first natural protected area in Moscow (Losinyi Ostrov national park) was created in 1983. In 2000-2010 because of transformation of many natural areas and expansion of urban development that idea has lost the initial value [4]. The number of visitors of the Moscow protected areas makes about 5 million people annually. So, now new ideas for urban green infrastructure planning and governance [1,2,3] should be useful for Moscow.
The actual experience of landscape planning in urban protected areas in Moscow reveals different difficulties. One of them is the contradiction between strict protection status of some protected areas due former high level of biodiversity and necessity of special regimes of landscape management suitable for all categories of city residents. Main priorities for landscape planning in urban protected areas depend on a wide set of applied functions. Six categories of protected areas designated in the Moscow City Law agree with the categories of federal status, and five have the special status – natural and historical park, reserve area, ecological park, urban forest and water protected area. Establishment of special category of natural and historical park reflects the need to preserve not only natural, but also historical and cultural sights – estates, sites of ancient settlement, temple, etc.
From the point of view of principles of urban green infrastructure the main actual gaps of management for urban protected areas were revealed. There are the insufficient availability of protected areas in different districts of the city, non-adequate transport access, including for disabled person, weakness of linkages with protected areas in the Moscow suburbs, absence of the general management programs for forest belt of the region, space discrepancy of urban protected areas to the world city green standards and ecotourism. At the same time the main aim of landscape planning into the boundaries of protected areas is to define the desired status of landscape depending of landscape sensivity and capacity and human perception. Unlike wildlife nature reserves the main pattern for landscape planning is cultural landscape that means landscape changed by human activity and percepted by people.