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Phew, so glad there is no homelessness in Russia or China...
As someone who's grown up in one of those and now rearing a child in Canada, I'd like to tell you that it was an absolutely incredible place to grow up in. The urban planning is such that there's parks with kid playgrounds sprinkled between the buildings. There's ample trees. There's schools and kindergartens at walking distance where kids would often walk alone to/fro. There's convenient public transit stops. There's density that lets kids make tons of friends and always have someone to play with without "playdates." Parenting in such a social environment is so much easier than what parents face in Toronto, it's not even funny.
E: Oh and the square footage in the average commie block apt is equivalent to a large old-school 2 or 3-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Most are family-sized units.
I still live in one of these, walking my dog is a treat, so many trees, kindergarten, school, pharmacy, groceries, even a pub all within 200 meters.
The part I hate about this place the most is that they made a roundabout in front of the school so parents can drop their kid off by car easier, it's the most americanized aspect, absolutely disgusting, there are literally two bus stops next to this school going in both directions.
square footage? what kind of weird camera are you using?
That's my Canada goose brain talking. 😆🪿 It's literally the common term used to refer to the total area of a housing unit. Here for example a major real estate firm explains the importance of square footage measurement.
For extra entertainment, this is a handy flowchart of Canadian units of measurement:
💀
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Ultra luxury apartments are usually vacant most of the time, because the owners live elsewhere and only use that property for money laundering.
not money laundering, gambling. secure a loan with the property as collateral, put that $ into the stock market.
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I mean, after we build them we can also let people do gorgeous art on them
You also like.. don’t have to use brutalist architecture. You can build them in any shape you want so long as the building won’t fall down.
The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they're built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It's how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.
Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times
Or if the design is suitable for machines to streamline a lot of building process so you can build them extremely efficiently, then go for it, you can "personalize" it after the building is there to live in.
I find it interesting that it's considered a design choice and style so much when it's kind of about necessity and just using what works.
But then it does become a sort of mode or aesthetic in art and culture for what it represents.
Also these are not painted, where I live we have their walls painted in colours with sometimes shapes and some have big art on them. Also there are usually small parks or grass plots with trees around and playgrounds.
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I mean, it's the left-wingers who want to increase the level of education for everybody, and that's one of the things that is shown to slow population growth. It's the insane population pressures that result in the need for building stuff like that.
Also projects are not left wing architecture. They're compromise with shitstain conservatives that will never properly fund a project even if it gets approved.
Population across the world will start decreasing, fertility rates are all lower than they should be to sustain population. I think the main reason it increased so much is the average life span is high these days with all the advances in medical care.
Ah yes so depressing and ugly that they’re featured in an architectural magazine. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/vienna-social-housing/
Right wing architecture
TIL the hammers in The Wall were based on Nazi architecture.
Bonus: this happened while we're listening to Pink Floyd and bakimg christmas cookies.
Seen a lot of appartments built by developers that are similar in a smaller way. I always put it down to cheapest cost and maximum profit. Nothing to do with ideology just expedience or greed.
Critiquing the visual appearance of architecture sounds like some Woke Leftist Liberal Arts shit to me.
My parents raised me in a hole under a tree stump and it built my character. Now I'm the assistant manager at three different car dealerships. You lefties with your indoor plumbing and central air will never have this much success
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eli5 how this is specifically left-wing architecture?
Housing people efficiently so everyone can have a roof over their head, running warm water and central heating; regardless whether they have money or not
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I mean NGL the leftist architecture is very depressing. I think with current infrastructure if all houses were occupied homelessness wouldnt be a problem in most western countries right?
there are more empty homes/apartments in every city/town in the country than there are homeless people in those areas, yes.
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Isn't this authoritarian architecture and not left wing architecture?
Left wing is so loosely defined you can ask two people and get three answer's. In this case the poster seems right wing and for him left wing=USSR. Ignoring that, this building style is probably the most efficient way to house as many people for as cheap as possible as fast as possible, which seems pretty left wing to me
Why is total efficiency left wing? Isn't maximizing profit right wing? The buildings should be built to maximize happiness of the people who, together, decide on the architecture... at the expense of profit.
efficiency and maximum extracted profit are not the same thing
the modern western housing construction process from start to finish is an incredibly inefficient process which is designed around minimizing as much risk and maximizing as much profit to the financiers, nothing about it is designed around effecient home-building.
Making anything better is left wing.
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Generally left wing is 'making things better for people would be nice'
And is mostly bitterly divided between 'cool, so let's get started!' And 'we must form a committee and personality cult to do capitalist accellerationism, only then can we murder everyone in the first group and then do the thing’ with some absolutely batshit jewels of ideology mixed in.
And the commie blocks are really in the center of that venn diagram. The party that made them was soaked in leftist blood, but the reason they look like that is because building them fast meant people got homes faster, so they were less concerned with giving each one a unique style.
Yep. They did a lot of bullshit and I'd argue they were profoundly reactionary, but the Bolsheviks were still minimum viable communist, and did a lot of communism when it wasn't purge time.
Which sounds and was pointlessly awful, but I have spent a lot of time with people on the streets, and I think that's still less terror, less pointless death and suffering.
Excellent answer
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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