The Heavenly Hundred Public Garden to be established

The activists have anticipated this session of the Kyiv City Council. The agenda of the session of Kyiv City Council on September 24 included a number of questions connected with the development of the city, including one line about the decision “On cancelling the leasing contract of the land plots No. 91-6-00644 of 30.03.2007 (with amendments).” There was a whole story connected with this document: in 2007 the plot in 24-26 Mykhailivska Street, almost adjacent to St. Michael Square, was given out for building development. The planned hotel and office center could have taken the territory of the square. But the construction didn’t start because of the court proceedings. And in 2014 Kyivites themselves turned this plot into a garden city.

Local residents during the Maidan events decided to clean this area, which was overgrown with weed, littered, and for some reason abandoned by the builders. They cleaned it once and decided not to stop on this, but turn the place into a space, where one wouldn’t want to litter. That’s how the Heavenly Hundred Public Garden appeared. The idea of the content and aura was prompted by the events that were taking place at that time. However, today this is a territory where children like to play, adults like to come, where the vegetable garden is planted, harvest is gathered jointly, where auteur cinema is watched, and lectures on urban subjects are held.

Naturally, the activists came up with hope that this territory may be preserved in this unique way forever and that the green spaced in the center of the city could be protected from construction. However, in October 2014 a court made a ruling which kept the plans of the constructor in force. The activists initiated an analysis and checking of the documentation about the construction and got the support of the mayor that the public garden would be preserved. Only one decision made by the Kyiv City Council, for which the deputies voted recently, could remove the risks. Now for the UKRinvestresurs LLC it has been offered to stop the leasing of the land plot with an area of 0.2697 hectares and square of 0.0266 hectares because the company hasn’t fulfilled the terms of the contract, specifically the obligation to complete the development of the land plots and reconstruction and provision of necessary facilities for the object within the terms established by the project documentation, but no later than three years since the moment of the state registration of the contract,” the website of the Kyiv City Council mentions.

Of course, this is only the beginning of the process of making the public garden the property of the municipality. “The next Kyiv City Council will have to make the most drastic steps – make the public garden the property of the city,” the founder of the garden city Yevhenia Kulieba commented on her Facebook page. “These may include complicated negotiations with the owner, search of non-standard decisions, and lawsuits. But the members of the community are unanimous in their opinion that the territory of dignity cannot be the area of criminal construction.”