Society

Perhaps, in the not-so-distant future, people will be living in skyscrapers made of wood and concrete with a farm on the first floor and solar panels on the roof. Such a model of a future residential block was presented by the students of the master's programme ‘Prototyping Future Cities’. To create the model, they studied houses in Moscow that have been built over the past hundred years and analyzed international experience. Their model was presented at the Moscow Urban Forum in July and, on September 13 (HSE Day), it will be possible to see it again at Gorky Park.

The Russian government has approved a merger between German corporation, Bayer, and American producer of herbicides and genetically modified seeds, Monsanto. The main requirement for approval was that the advanced agricultural technologies be transferred by the corporation. A special centre established at HSE will coordinate the transfer.

HSE Graduate School of Urbanism has announced the results of the first international contest for students and young professionals ‘Cities For a Flying World’. The contest took place from May 29 to  November 7, 2017 and was a part of the admission campaign for the new Master’s programme of the HSE Graduate School of Urbanism ‘Prototyping Future Cities’. 

On November 16, the winners of the Prosvetitel (‘enlightener’) award for best popular science books in Russian were announced. 'Constructing languages: from Esperanto to Dothraki' by Alexander Piperski, Senior Lecturer at the School of Philology, won in the Humanities category. The winner in the Natural Sciences category is 'That’s crazy! A guidebook of psychological disorders for a big city resident', a book by HSE graduates Daria Varlamova and Anton Zainiev.

This exhibition, located at the HSE building on Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, near the Mandelstam Centre, tells the story of all the important stages in the poet’s life and work. It features photos, announcements of poetry nights, and documents testifying to Mandelstam’s arrest and death, as well as comments by the poet’s contemporaries.

Staff from the Design Laboratory (the design wing of the HSE School of Design) teamed up with design students to carry out an extensive study on the territorial branding of Moscow’s various districts. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students of HSE MIEM developed ‘smart systems’ for monitoring urban space and managing energy consumption and lighting systems. The projects were presented to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin during his most recent visit to the Higher School of Economics.