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.
for Westerners, City Beautiful did a video a few years back on Soviet city planning – starting at about 6m49s, he talks about the ideals of the microraion/microdistricts and what they were hoping to achieve
in Galina Tachieva’s Sprawl Repair Manual, her solution for urban sprawl is clustering/re-clustering neighborhoods (effectively creating a Western version of a microdistrict)
Sprawl Repair Manual
Wow. That’s an interesting guide.
I’m technically not a westerner (I live in Bucharest, Romania, a neighborhood called Drumul Taberei - look it up). I, too, was really excited when I saw the video and I thought that living in a neighborhood like this would be the best choice for me in the long run. Indeed, I am quite happy with the place I live. Space-wise, my apartment is decent, and I have great connections to the rest of the city via public transit (tram, metro, buses, trolleybuses). I have many amenities nearby, such as a shopping mall (yes, an actual shopping mall that I can walk to), a few supermarkets, countless stores, some specialized, even a library.
The municipality also seems to address some of the issues in my neighborhood, with some more recent commercial infill developments that allow you to travel less to, and some new alleys for pedestrians through empty green space (If you guys are interested, I might post some photos about that transformation). There are still no bike paths, but some rudimentary bike parking is being built.
However, I sometimes feel like both the American model of development and the Soviet model with microdistricts and the likes are just the wrong way of development. Like, they are both the results of centuries of industrial and technological evolution. But both just, somehow, lack that “vibe” of the city that the old city centers have. They are places where you can live - i.e. where you have a home, and you sleep, but if you’re not a resident, you just feel you don’t belong there. They’re just both so bland and indistinguishable from one another, while lacking in personality. I think we should get more cues from how cities were build previously, before the impact of people such as Le Corbusier over how we built things, in order to build more coherent and connected cities. 😁
Top of my mind comes this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0rH5ZiKV2Upart 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 😁
