https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKoUX1YxkQ0
In case anyone was wondering how life is outside the former Iron Curtain.
As someone born and raised in such an environment, I can safely say that all the points raised in this video are valid.
I currently do live in a denser area, but you can clearly tell it’s just not such a lively area. You do get to travel for a while to do your errands or hang out with people, as most people usually go downtown to get to the “third place”, as the old town is filled with bars, pubs, restaurants etc. And indeed, transit connectivity is good, but the years of neglect in the 1990s and early 2000s gave it a bad rep., so people were more inclined to get a car and ask for more car infrastructure. And yes, newer supermarkets post 1990 were indeed built with fairly large acres of land dedicated to parking.
part of the motivation for both the Soviet-style microdistrict and the American suburb came about after WWII and facing the problem of housing returning soldiers – the US solved it with cars and low-density housing (suburbs), Soviet Union solved it with public transit and medium-density housing (microdistricts) – the US got endless expanses of identical ranch-style housing, the Eastern bloc got domino lines of gray concrete khrushchevkas
@cerement indeed, those were some quick and dirty solutions that fixed the housing problem quickly. Yet they raised some whole different sets of issues that we’re only now dealing with 😁