In 2012 minister of culture of Moscow initiated the reform of city libraries. That year cultural department of Moscow city commissioned SVESMI, Rotterdam office for architecture and urbanism and publishing/bookstore project “Falanster”/Moscow to form a team and analyse the potential of Moscow municipal libraries and those of other Russian cities. An interdisciplinary team consisting of curators, publishing and retail specialists, as well as architects and urbanists studied Moscow's libraries as a multi-faceted system: not only were the structural parameters of the centralized system and the quality of contemporary services were examined, but also the attributes of the actual addresses of the buildings - as they are integrated into the fabric of the city. What can be done to transform these libraries into an important part of the cultural and social fabric of the city? How do you return Muscovites to the libraries? What must be done in order to ensure an open and free access of the city-dwellers to this source of information? What steps must be taken to turn the library into a real and contemporary cultural space? How does one recreate it as the city's living room? How do you make this destination attractive for the whole spectrum of the capital's population? The research set a goal to single out the critical aspects of the libraries' functioning, to find the hereto unfulfilled hidden potential of the network, and therefore the perspective of its development. Based on the investigation, the team have presented a set of guidelines for the redevelopment of the municipal library system in Moscow. The implementation of the reform started with a pilot project: redevelopment of the five libraries – five very different typologies - in various districts of Moscow: from the city centre to the outskirts. For each of the case-studies we proposed a package that includes spatial redevelopment scheme, new services, contextual communication strategy, new regimes of use, new programme for the local community and a new book policy. After testing the ideas and schemes we will be ready to extrapolate and to propose a flexible yet effective plan for how to deal with each and every case in the existing system. Currently all 5 projects are under construction (2 to be finished in fall, 3 before the end of the year)