The Disappearing Mass Housing of the Soviet Union
citylab.com
citylab.com
Those panel houses which have been renovated and their elevators replaced are really nice. All of the buildings are painted different collors and the whole place looks prety idilic. Only real problem for the residents, is that it is hard to rase kids when you have one and a half bedrooms...
Now, Czech culture has become generational. For almost the majorty of my friends, the older generation lives in a panel house. Those are the grandmas and grandpas of my peers. The parents of my peers have bought a newer appartment somewhere else. And they have left the appartment in the panel house to their batchelor children, who like having cheep/free housing to live in till they get married.
However, there are also some massive developments at the edge of the city, where there are 20-30 panel houses, all huge, and no good public transport. The green areas have been replaced with parking lots and anyone who comes close wants to kill themselves.
It is shocking to me, how two buildings built from the same plans, 30 minutes appart, can give such a different impression. One seems like a dream and the other seems like dystopia.
http://img00.deviantart.net/15bd/i/2013/039/8/f/jerry_seinfe...
similarly the main apartment in friends seems pretty large
http://pre14.deviantart.net/3e01/th/pre/i/2016/036/8/8/frien... - note that this diagram is for both the girls apartment and the guys apartment across the hall, so we are looking at two apartments here
quick credit to the artist of these diagrams, they have a ton of other shows on their deviantart page[1]
But why did Seinfeld/Friends engage in this trick?
My guess: Seinfeld/Friends was aimed to appeal to a mass american audience, which is why I imagine they had such large apartments -- they wanted something that still looked "small" to middle americans and outer suburban dwellers, but it still obviously had to be much larger than real manhattan apartment sizes, because filming in a realistic 350sqft apartment set (1) would have been awkward to even shoot (2) would have seemed so small as to be hard to believe or at least steal the scene focus when the apartment is supposed to just be a backdrop.
So yeah, compared to that, the flat they had in "Friends" was incredibly spacious.
New development is also a filer for social problems. Fewer crime, drugs and people with mental issues.
I guess it depends on where exactly you lived and what neighbors you had.
maybe you will find this kind of renovation interesting.
Destroying them seems the most effective solution as of now. It changes people living there mindset, it removes the memories of the issues attached to the architecture.
https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.com/album/the-irony-of-fate-ori...
I think my favorite track is "Along My Street for Many Years."
They were built really quickly, often on the outskirts of cities, where there was plenty of undeveloped land. They were often placed in large groups. The landscape was bleak at the beginning. Huge gray apartment blocks spaced in a random fashion.
There was a lot of space between them. Large empty spaces. Sure, footpaths were set down, grass was sown, and small trees were planted. But in the beginning, they looked bleak.
Fast forward thirty or forty years. The trees have grown huge. The playgrounds are no longer depressing. On the outside, they are actually very nice. They were insulated and painted and are no longer drab. These developments have a park vibe to the, with the large trees, asymmetric building placement, and large open spaces.
This is not taking into account the conditions inside, as those varied from country to country, city to city, and development to development. Many have been modernized, but some still have the fundamental problems mentioned by others.
The moral of the story is that large trees and open spaces make for pleasant living.
Fast forward decades, many of them became ruins and barely liveable places (for tons of different factors).
Now they've been a thorn in France's shoe, some neighborhood have been recently deeply remodeled. A good 50% of blocks, towers and bars have been destroyed and replaced by smaller blocks. The difference in scale makes the place liveable. I couldn't believe the impact on the city.. Having smaller heights and tinier blocks instead of prison like huge and dense structures brings back life and peace.
Previously there were renovation plans but they just fixed breakage and applied a new layer of paint. These would quickly become dirty, with graffitis back soon too. But the new blocks are still clean after 2 years.
My feeling is now that housing projects were a necessary error of the post war era; but they're far from optimal for a sense of good life.
What often happens with projects in Europe is as metropolitan areas expand, the then-outskirts where the blocks originally were become attractive located land. Not sure the mechanics of this in France though, but could be the same dynamics.
Here's the added paragraph https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13841394
I don't think ethnic composition matters as much as income bracket. Middle class people tend to have both means and priority to care after their property.
Many downsides to those indeed, but that feeling of moving to an new apartment after waiting in line for years and years. I still remember it to this day. I even had my very own tiny room.
Interestingly even though those houses were old they were pretty solid, and isolated noise better than a few American apartment building I've lived in, with walls made from drywall and wood.
As for the units that haven't been modernized, they're still better quality housing than what you find in lower income neighborhoods in the United States. I wouldn't be thrilled to live in one, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
My mom lived in a similar style building in Poland. The quality wasn't great, but my cousins have renovated some of their units to really nice sleek modern apartments.
You could walk on footpaths to the open-air market, to the kiosks, even to restaurants, didn't have to worry about traffic or road noise, it felt just like a very natural, easy place to live.
Contrast that with living in Seattle, where even where it's walkable, so much of the public space is given up to cars.
https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Braszczok,+Brzeszcze/@49.97...
I absolutely love Polish neighborhoods, I wish the style remained and the buildings were upgraded to newer versions.
- Now is precisely the worst time for projects of that scale. The only mass housing the modern Russia can build is 25-story ugly buildings without parking, trees, roads, schools but with chilling winds between the apartment towers. Urban planning and landscape design are completely nonexistent.
- Compared to US or Western Europe, people are cramped into tiny apartments. No suburbia. No gardens. No neigbours. No roads. No backyard, no place to play. Walkable tho, if you are lucky.
- The quality of urban layout was actually dwindling all the time. Stalinist 5-storeys were okay (green, near to public transportation, with shops), 5-storey block khruschevki were worse (no more shops, worse apartments), 9- to 17- block brezhnevki were even worse (further from city centers and public transit, snow hurricanes between tall towers, no infrastructure, no trees), and what gets built today is abysmal.
- So are they going to replace okay-ish 5-storeys with this:
http://varlamov.ru/2210604.html
- For some reason, people still buy those apartments. Even given choice. It's a complete mystery to me. If you ask a Russian which car he wants, he'd probably go for a sport BMW. But ask the same about apartments, and he'll promptly point to concrete coffin on the outskirts.
Disclaimer: happy resident of an apartment in 1901 built house in SPb.
It's like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infill but without planning, just randomly.
People buy those apartments because there is no much chose. Myself I don't really know any alternatives.
Atrocious housing stock.
In SPB at least, new construction is going up as fast as they can do it, and while a lot of it is done in more remote areas (end of Metro lines), there is plenty to support people who live in those areas. Dozens of full grocery stores within walking distance at the base of every complex, bus transit is plentiful and relatively frequent (compared to US bus schedules anyways), and the developers/city do seem to try to create good public places for families, such as playgrounds and parks. I have to echo what a lot of others have said, it's nice to be able to walk through the complexes and not have to worry too much about cars. The complexes closer to the city proper have some difficulty though with cleanliness just because a lot of the gardens and embankments aren't well tended to or the infrastructure built to contain the dirt has finally given out after 60 some years, and no one has bothered to fix it. The city tearing up roads and grass embankments to replace ancient plumbing doesn't help much either.
It's not perfect, obviously - the newer buildings are mostly small one or two room apartments, but they have modern amenities, are wired up with modern network and electrical, and overall look nice.
Don't think they'd ever fly in the US though...just not "personal" enough.
I wonder if that's really true. Personally I hate paying rent ... absolutely hate it. Most of my day is spent either at office or at coffeeshops/bars for work and again in gym/bars/coffeeshops/traveling after work/on the weekends. A house is just a place to sleep and cook when I have some time. I absolutely hate paying ~10% of my paycheck for rent; so if we had such "impersonal" but functional residences, I would gladly live in them.
And my personal experience is that people would in general dislike it, with a preference for a private space. I remember comments about the apartments I had when I lived in the US being "small"; I'm of the same opinion as you that a home is pretty much just a place to rest, cook, and clean up, and if I could find a smaller place with the few amenities I wanted, I would.
But that doesn't really seem to be what people are interested in, and the few smaller living spaces available are usually inflated in price due to them having been a fad at one point.
The idea of apartment ownership is also a bit different in the US versus abroad, as my partner's family owns their apartment - they can do the floors, drill into walls, remodel the bathroom, all without anyone else's approval. Such renovations are considered pretty standard and from what I'm told they're considered already as part of the cost of purchasing an apartment. The location and the space is more important than what it looks like.
Compared to apartments in the US that are pretty clear about what sort of decorating and remodeling is and isn't allowed, and the sense of home is much different.
Pretty frustrating sentiment. This is why we have a housing crisis in the bay area, NIMBYism.
It's very frustrating indeed when you lived all our life in that apartment, your pension is minimal just enough to scrape by, and some developer (probably corrupt, in bed with the city mayor) comes and kicks you out so they can build a fancy apartment building to sell it to some multi-millionaire.
I am sure it' s just like the bay area :-)
Do you think children should be punished for the failures of their parents?