CHANGELOG

What appeared, and when

Current version2.227 August 2026

The project changes faster than anything gets published about it. This page shows what changed and on which day, so that "work is under way" need not be taken on trust.

  • The home page now has an enquiry form: leave a contact and briefly describe the task — a digital twin, a village or neighbourhood, data and calculations. The enquiry goes to the project team, and the contact is used only to reply.
  • The Istrinskie Pereleski model updated: stairwell openings now have guard rails, sixty house-type previews and fourteen settlement views were re-rendered. The verification report was recomputed: 2,702 checks, no errors.
  • A new menu on every page: the Menu button in the header opens every section of the site in six groups, with search, recently opened sections and the current page highlighted. It also opens from the keyboard with Ctrl + K or /.
  • A new section, History of planning: twenty-two profiles of the ideologists, practitioners and critics of Gosplan — from Krzhizhanovsky and Kondratiev to Kantorovich, Glushkov, Hayek, Kornai and Naishul. Each profile has sources, a timeline and two lists: what open planning takes and what it does not repeat. A graph of ideas shows 66 links between the authors — influences, debates, direct replies, parallel paths, institutions and shared fates — and a comparison puts the same nine questions to all of them.
  • An interactive digital twin of the “Istra Copses” settlement: a first-person walk, time of day and seasons, a mini-map, house selection with statuses, a view from the facade and a viewing history. It runs in the browser on a computer or phone, with no installation and no graphics server.
  • The “Housing affordability” section: the IEF RAS 2026 calculation of the income a family needs for a 54 m² flat with a mortgage and the share of households who can afford it. We recalculated the report’s tables, found parameters it does not state (a 30% down payment on Rosstat’s price) and applied the same formula to 85 regions using Rosstat and Bank of Russia data. A calculator on the same formula.
  • Three project directions — private houses, apartment buildings and tourism — and six tourism objects in 3D: glamping, an eco-hotel, a campsite, a bathhouse complex, a visitor centre and a waterfront. Four hydro facilities have been added to the digital twins section: a small and a containerised hydro plant, a water intake and a digital control room. Each model can be explored outside and inside right in the browser, or downloaded. The demonstration settlement “Istra Copses” with 250 houses: a general plan, house selection and a walk into the rooms. These are our own models, not photographs of built objects; materials, plants and furniture are from ambientCG and Poly Haven under CC0.
  • The “1965 and 2020” section: the 1965 economic reform and Strategy 2020 next to the green block standard — what they changed, how delivery was measured, who was accountable, what stopped them, and what we take from this into the project.
  • A second village in the digital twin: thirty two-storey houses and a comb layout modelled on Zosimova Pustyn — a spine street with three cross streets and plots of 1 320 m². The ground floor repeats the single-storey house; above it a stair in the living room, a hall, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a balcony over the terrace. Three walks: the street, entering the house and climbing to the upper floor, and the dining table. The layout figures come from an OpenStreetMap extract (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL); the building geometry is ours.
  • The Green Quarter gained interiors: 376 flats with layouts, furniture and glazing, and a new “entering a flat” walk — from the courtyard through the entrance hall into the show flat and up to the window onto the boulevard. The trees in shot are models rather than procedural canopies: our own Nanite-ready foliage instead of the simplified fallback mesh that made the canopies disappear. Camera routes are now set out along the centre lines of the openings and checked with rays before rendering.
  • The Digital Twin clips were re-rendered in Unreal Engine 5.8: Lumen with hardware ray tracing, ambientCG PBR materials (CC0) projected in world space and tinted with OpenStreetMap colours, procedural windows from tagged storey counts, fixed roofs of walls and skillion parts. The scene passport lists materials and limits; trees remain schematic.
  • The Digital Twin section gained a modular-home village built from a site video: 29 houses of two types with interiors you can enter, four Unreal Engine walks (overview, street, entering a house and the table “down to the fork”) and a VR mode. Trees and the show-house furnishings are free Poly Haven models (CC0); facades use sandwich panels and timber cladding on ambientCG textures. The VR viewer now has three modes: walk, top view and a map with a scale bar; a back-to-top button was added to every page.
  • The indicators, method and standard pages gained video flights over a typical quarter brought up to the 3-30-300 rule. It is a visualisation, not footage, and is labelled as such; under each frame is a link to the scene passport with the computed values.
  • The video flights are now scrolled: the frame stays fixed on screen, the camera moves with the page, and three short chapters say what to look at.
  • The Digital Twin section opened: the Kremlin, Manezhnaya and Red Square assembled into a 3D model from OpenStreetMap open data and shown as three scrolled walks. What comes from the data and what the data lacks is stated on the page and in the scene passport.
  • The Digital Twin page gained a free VR walk: the same OpenStreetMap model of the Kremlin and Manezhnaya opens in a headset browser (WebXR), on a computer and on a phone. You start on Red Square at eye level; a second button leads into the green quarter.
  • The home page opens with video: a slow flight over the Vertical Forest in Milan and Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. It is real footage of built places, not a render; the authors are credited under the frame. On phones and with animation turned off a still frame remains, and a corner button pauses the video.
  • The Documents section opened: every PDF of the project in one place with page count, size and date. Thirteen sections gained print versions in three languages; they are built from the page text automatically and cannot drift from it.
  • The book is out: every section of the site in one PDF in three languages, with clickable contents, bookmarks and a list of sources for each chapter.
2.2
  • Data collection for the connection map finished: 257 regions, 15 countries, 262,492 settlements.
  • The connection map and the Green Quarter were added to the top menu, which was rebuilt so the new sections fit on a phone.
  • Links between sections: architecture, method and programme now lead to the map, and the map leads back to architecture.
  • Long headings no longer run past the edge of a phone screen.
  • The nomenclature of green framework indicators was published: nine quantities with units, data sources, and a statement of which cannot be computed today.
  • A new section on the cost of inaction: a method for calculating what the absence of a standard costs.
  • Photographs with a slider appeared in the sections; every image names its author and licence.
  • A new section opened on Norilsk: why a dome over an Arctic city is incompatible with permafrost, and what to build instead.
  • A new section opened: what is digitised and what is not — a register of the state of territorial planning data.
  • A new site mark: at 16 px the previous icon turned into a dark smudge.
  • The project now has a version number and this page.
  • The Connection Map section opened: gas infrastructure and substations of 35 kV and above.
  • The map basemap was replaced; the previous one stopped serving tiles without a key.
  • The System Architecture section opened: layers, loops, and what actually gets signed.
  • The Green Quarter Standard programme was published, on the gap between green standards for a building and the territory between buildings.
  • A light theme and a theme switch were added.
  • The red was brought up to a readable contrast ratio.
  • The biophilic transformation method became its own section, with the calculation part spelled out.
  • The Selo 2.0 section opened.
  • The site moved to a new server.
  • Search engines are now notified about new pages.

On the completeness of these records

The log runs by date, not by version number. Before 27 August 2026 the project was not versioned: a number existed as a caption on a single page and was attached to nothing. Assigning numbers retroactively would pass a reconstruction off as a record, so a number appears only where one was genuinely assigned. Entries begin in August 2026; earlier history was not kept in any verifiable form.