Partner Article

Moscow visit secures tender opportunity

Newcastle based architect and urban design practice IDPartnership (IDP), has received an invitation to submit a sustainable masterplan for the Winter Olympic’s Village which will take place in Russia in 2014.

IDP’s senior partner and his consultant team visited Moscow as part of a mission to showcase the UK’s ability to deliver sustainable technologies to the Russian Federation.

As a result of the global financial situation, large scale developments and infrastructural projects are now on hold in Russia, and the country is looking for new techniques and business models in order to ‘jump start’ its economy.

IDP specialise in the delivery of economic and spatial masterplanning, with a particular interest in sustainable development. The IDP team gave a presentation on these topics to 120 delegates at a Moscow Town Hall, and were impressed by the Russians’ ability to quickly grasp the economic opportunities of turning their “waste mountains” into energy.

Senior partner Mark Massey said: “We like to think that in the West we are business minded and open to entrepreneurial ideas, however, our new Russian colleagues amazed me firstly, with their grasp of the technologies we were speaking of and secondly, with their enthusiasm for their application.”

On the final day of the delegation, Mark and his consultant team were formally invited to forward proposals for the sustainable development of the Olympic Village at Sochi in Krasnodar Province on the Black Sea.

Mr Massey said: “North East development and engineering expertise can be effectively exported to the rest of the world. The present world financial crisis creates exactly the right opportunity for us to reappraise how we conceive, plan and deliver our communities, as well as re-think the process on the basis of sustainable infrastructures. This allows us to eliminate waste and turn it into energy and resource. In a crazy kind of way ‘The Future is Rubbish’.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .