• The program is structured for urban planners and urban researchers who potentially can work with modern urban agenda no matter where they are employed (government, development and real estate business, academia). Sixty seven students are currently pursuing this program, and three of them are international. Academic Supervisor: Vitaly Stadnikov, PhD;
• Key Russian partners: MARCHI (Moscow Architectural Institute), Strelka Institute of Media and Design, MARSH, Institute for the General Plan of the City of Moscow - joint professional activities, exchange of students and professors, joint master programs;
• Key overseas partners: Institute for Advance Architecture of Catalonia (FabLab network); L’Ecole d’Urbanism de Paris (Student and Professor Exchange); State University of Miami (FabLab network);
• The program aims to provide fundamental training to professionals in urban planning, urban governance and urban research.

• The program has been launched in September, 2016;
• Academic Supervisor: Alexei Novikov, PhD.
• The program is structured for urban planners, urban design specialists and researchers capable of conducting research-based design practices.
• Key Russian partners: Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design – joint master program.
• International professors from European and American universities will deliver some program courses. This is an experimental program for professionals in urban planning and design, and its key objective is to introduce research-based design to the urban planners. Program curriculum includes workshop series featuring international experts in urban planning, which is a new method of teaching in this field. The program will support Strategic Academic Unit’s research projects in experimental urbanism, including post-city studies, development of instruments and institutes in supporting urban planning. Part of the program is focused on critical planning, which is an integral part of advocacy planning (one of the Strategic Academic Unit’s research projects).

• The program is scheduled for launching in 2017. The program will be supervised by Vicente Guallart, professor at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and the head of HSE International Laboratory for the Experimental Urban Design. The program is tailored for urban planners and urban researchers. This will be a joint program with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, and its graduates will receive international degree certificates. The list of key partners also includes the Moscow Institute of Architecture, Strelka Institute of Media and Design, Moscow School of Architecture, Institute for the General Plan of the City of Moscow and Miami University.
• This fundamental program equips the professionals in urban planning, urban studies and urban management with new planning tools and new research ideology based on up-to-date approaches to city environment and urban society. The program will support the research projects of the HSE International Laboratory for the Experimental Urban Design, which will in its turn serve as the testing ground for new ideas and prototypes.

• The Master program “Transportation planning” is the first in Russia, fully compliant with the modern world concepts and practices in this field. The main target audience of the program are the state and municipal employees of federal and regional executive authorities, local self-government bodies responsible for the development of regional and urban transport systems, staff of specialized research and design institutes, developers, consulting companies and public organizations.
• The program incldes a series of traditional courses digests, updated with the latest world practices (transport economics, road design and engineering structures, design of urban electric transport systems, maintenance of road and urban transport, exploitation of private and public passenger transport, traffic management and etc.) This assumes the systemic linkage of these elements with a focus on such points as the analysis of transport tbehaviour, the use of instruments of traffic modelling, demand management, road pricing, sustainable mobility and etc.

The project is carried out by the International Laboratory for the Experimental Urban Design under the leadership of Guallart Vicente.

Strategic plans for cities and sites related to Self-sufficient Cities, Ecological Urbanism, Mobility and overall Urban Transformation will be developed. All these studies should be oriented to define a long-term plan, a strategic one, structured in order to facilitate the short-term small projects and concrete urban transformations. In this case, Strategic Academic Unit could operate to help urban governments in the organization of competitions and other types of engagement into city development.

The other areas of research include technological plans for the development of information communication technologies (ICT) in cities; general plans for cities and regions, in collaboration with local and international organizations. In this case the studies will aim to define a long term strategic vision for the implementation of information technologies in the different fields of urban transformation and their regional impact. The latter represents a crucial factor in the extensive territory of Russia and other emerging markets.

Prototype projects, concentrated around the borderline between research and urban transformation policies, will be implemented. The prototypes will serve as testbed for a broader implementation of such projects in the cities world-wide. Prototype projects could stem from the work developed both by students and researchers. From this point of view, the ability of the Strategic Academic Unit to produce real short-term outcome in Moscow, Russia and other countries will be crucial.

The project has been developed by the Laboratory for Advocacy Planning and will be continued in collaboration with the Center for Adoptable Urban Governance. Project head - Pavel Akimov.

The project’s goal is to create a public advocacy planning practice, which could support urban conflicts resolution and represent various stakeholders in the urban planning process.

For the moment advocacy planning is not a common practice yet. Some elements of it such as fairness and equality evaluation of urban projects do exist in some countries, but still need to be reinforced by reputable professional practice institutionalized in a way similar to regular civil advocacy.

Strategic Academic Unit has been developing a framework of advocacy planning with the idea to create a competitive environment for planning expertise and decision-making that supports public planning debates.

Along with advocacy planning ideology, Strategic Academic Unit is developing a system of adoptable urban governance practices that are based on multi-jurisdictional conventions among those urban jurisdictions that aim to resolve some common issues (planning, garbage collection and disposal, tariff setting, social protection of population, etc.)

Project head: Pavel Kozlov, chief expert of Centre for Transport Modelling.

Project focus: Implementation of a research programme “Creating New Generation of Transport Models, Capable of Working with New Data Formats”.

Summary: Software registration - an integrated computer transport modelling system, capable of working with new data formats such as mobile network operators, “Smart City” systems, etc.

Strategic Academic Unit is one of the world leaders in transportation flow modelling. The unique set of simulation instruments allowing to cope with multi-modal effects and other non-trivial side factors caused by growth and dissipation of traffic jams in critical nodes of the traffic system has been created here on the basis of standard programming complex AIMSUN.

It has been tested in such large-scale project as transportation flow plan for 2018 International Football Cup.

The project is supported by our applied mathematics and computer science colleagues who are helping with the development of new design concepts for “large” transportation models for megacities.

The ideology of the simulation software such as (CUBE, EMME/3, PTV VISSUM, AIMSUN, TRANSCAD, TRANSNET) becomes outdated in the current environment that is now filled with valuable real-time high-precision data. The purpose of the project is to create a new generation of transportation models capable to work with new types of datasets. This will allow to reduce the scope of over-simplified assumptions down to minimal level, and increase the precision of the models output.