Rather than overdevelop a new piece of land acquired by Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has announced the city's intentions to keep the land as green as possible to avoid the severe congestion problems that much of the city is already plagued by.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is promising that the piece of the Moscow region appended to the capital earlier this year won't be covered with new construction but will be preserved as a tree-dotted residential area.

"No type of mega-city is being planned" for the land, Sobyanin said.

"When we were requesting this land, the mindset was the opposite — to preserve it as it mostly is today, namely as green spaces, zones and large park lands," the mayor said on the TV-Tsentr television station on Saturday, Itar-Tass reported.

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