Adventures in the urban space

The night walks of Sergey Nikitin and his MosKultProg show the familiar city in an unexpected perspective

An interview of Tzvetana Chipkova

A summer night. 300 people on bikes move along the empty streets of Moscow. They stop and attentively listen to lectures in architecture in front of select buildings. That is what the typical Moscow “bike night” looks like – the specialty of the historian Sergey Nikitin and his organization MosKultProg. BBC Radio calls their project “one of the biggest scientific seminars in the world in terms of number of participants”. And truly – between 200 and 300 people come every time, and the last Moscow bike night brought together 900. In May of this year, they realized an architectural urbanistic campaign for the first time in Rome. The night biking tour of the city was dedicated to its development as capital of Italy.

A How did you get the idea about the “bike nights”?
SN It all started in 1997 – I was still at university. I was interested in the architecture of the 20’s, but not solely in the architecture, and rather in the language of culture as it is seen by our famous scientist semiotician Yuri Lotman. My friends and I started walking around the city, choosing topics for our term and graduation projects. …

Read the whole interview in ABITARE 009