Moscow will more than double in size under a new plan signed off by the city's Mayor Sergei Sobyanin on Monday, in a bid to ease the city's chronic overcrowding and transport problems.
Last month, President Dmitry Medvedev proposed expanding the Moscow city boundaries, establishing "a metropolitan federal district" and relocating a significant part of state and government agencies beyond the current city limits.
The city's territory will be more than doubled with the addition of tracts of land between the Kievskoye and Varshavskoye highways in the southwest and south, as well as tracts abutting the Moscow Rail Circle.
Transport planning experts warn that it could take up to seven years to develop the surface transport infrastructure of Russia's metropolitan federal district.
"It will take between one and a half and two years to design the project and another five to put in place the road transport infrastructure," Mikhail Blinkin, director of research at Moscow's Transport and Road Institute said on Tuesday.
The general principle is transition from a monocentric to a polycentric city, he said, adding that the "axis" of the new territory will be the Kaluzhskoye Highway in the southwest.
Moscow's current territory is 107,000 hectares with a population of 11.5 million.
In the past 50 years its territory has grown 20 percent while the population has doubled.
The population density is currently 11,000 people per square kilometer, compared to less than 4,000 in Berlin.
