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Moscow authorities to seek international expertise for city expansion - mayor

09 December 2011 04:19 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Moscow authorities will seek the expertise of international developers and architects in order to draft a scheme of a major expansion of the Russian capital for the first time in the past 50 years, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, APA reports quoting RIA Novosti.

â€œThis year we will announce a tender to create a development concept for Moscow and the region as an agglomeration,â€ Sobyanin said in an interview with U.S. financial news company Bloomberg on Thursday.

â€œLeading architectural companies that deal with city development will take part,â€ he said.

The expansion of the city will allow state and government agencies to move beyond the current city limits. Currently, Moscow is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe, with 11.5 million residents or about 11,000 people per square kilometer (about 28,000 per square mile).

The last major expansion of Moscow’s boundaries was in 1961, when the city’s population was 6 million, officials said.

In summer, President Dmitry Medvedev proposed expanding the Moscow city boundaries, establishing "a metropolitan federal district" and relocating officials and bankers out of the traffic-clogged center into surrounding suburbs.

Overall, the plan adds 1,440 square kilometers (about 560 square miles) to the city’s current territory of 1,070 square kilometers, absorbing tracts of land between the Kievskoye and Varshavskoye highways in the southwest and south, as well as tracts abutting the belt railroad around Moscow.

Sobyanin, who replaced Yury Luzhkov as Moscow mayor in October 2010, has in particular been tasked with resolving the problem of endless traffic jams in the city.