Hacker News Reader

Comment by egao1980 | Hacker News Reader

egao1980

USSR had implemented this idea and it worked fine while factories / companies were providing accommodation in the walking distance along with all the necessary services - schools, hospitals, kindergartens and shops.

I doubt that it would work in a modern Capitalist society unless we all work from home.

View on HN

USSR had chronic shortages in basic consumer goods like toilet paper, steadily fell behind the West in emerging technologies like semiconductors, and eventually went bankrupt [1], so I don't think you could describe anything in its centrally planned economy.

Japan has many highly mixed neighorhoods, but unlike in the Soviet example, they emerge organically, because zoning restrictions are lax.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/28/world/big-soviet-budget-d...

I'm confused, are you insinuating that Barcelona isn't real or not part of a modern capitalist society? These superblocks already exist in the city. This urban design has been around longer than the USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample

Barcelona's blocks are nice but won't work as a mostly pedestrian self contained urban unit. People have to work and get social services outside those blocks.

If you scale them up a bit, add infrastructure, add workplaces and make it 10-15 walking distance and add public transit links to other such places that will do it.

As most anything else it did not work in USSR either for the most part.

> USSR had implemented this idea

Press [X] to doubt

Do you have any source that the USSR had superblocks like this?

They are called Microdistricts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict

Examples: https://imgur.com/a/lxgdEpM

Not seeing a lot of evidence that this is similar? For example, the sections without roads don't necessarily look easily permeable to walk/bike traffic, which is a relatively defining trait.

Edit: well, in some sense yeah it's a huge block and thus a super block, but in terms of Barcelona-style super blocks with similar aims...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com