油管观众讨论苏美城市设计、社会主义和资本主义

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Luiz Alex Phoenix
They laughed at the Soviets, told children that in the Soviet Union a family lived in a cramped apartment and shared their car. Now they tell workers about how great it is to live in a small coop without healthcare and then pay some more to used an car sharing app. Feels like the worst of both worlds.

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wyqtor
If you look at a satellite photo of Moscow or St. Petersburg or Kiev, the one thing that will strike you is the massive amount of greenery inside the microdistricts, between the apartment blocks.

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Max B
I lived in moscow for 20 years and then in Northeast of US for 20 years. I want to say that while soviet buildings are ugly to look  at the overall urban planning in large cities in USSR was superior.
In most cities in US you need car, there is no other option,  public transport is horrible, or , very often , not available at all.  US houses are larger but in densely populated areas all you have is streets of 3 stories of essentially same houses/townhouses , roads and cars. There is no shops within walking distance, no parks. without a car you can walk miles and miles on exact same streets  . yeah houses themselves are nicer, but living space around them is non existent.

in Russia the multistory apartments themselves are horrible (often way worse than US projects), but you have a lot of green space, children and adult parks to walk around.
City like new york has very few green spaces  compared to amount of people living there. Moscow has huge amount of green spaces - large parks, small parks and simply courtyard squares everywhere.  In us cities you typically have a few medium sized park for entire city, and thats it. Like boston commons or central park

Us suburbs is another topic. But again same design  -you cannot do anything fun if you just leave your house - there is nothing in walking distance. You need first get into car and drive somewhere

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As someone who was born and raised in a Khrushchevka as part of a "mini-district", I have to say, I was pretty happy there.  It's a giant city block with dozens of buildings and lots of trees between them, no car traffic, there were multiple playgrounds and soccer fields or basketball courts.  My school was a 5 minute walk. Local clinic was like 15 minute walk.  Supermarket was a 5 minutes away.    3 of us lived in a 2 bedroom small flat and that was considered "lots of space".  There were literally 4 floor plans and all my friends had one of those 4 floorplans, so when I walked into a new apartment, i knew exactly where everything was.  Kind of funny.  Oh, and all the modern pictures of those grey, bleak, run down buildings - that wasn't the case in USSR. It was well-maintained - freshly painted and masonry fixed every few years.  Lots of gardens and flowers.  It wasn't terrible... still was  poor compared to spaces in  American suburban homes and multiple TVs and cars.

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Nikita Suchkov
I'm a Russian urban researcher focusing on constructivism and living in Moscow. Your narrative is surprisingly exact, neutral and not ideologically coloured about the Soviet architecture like other American stories. I really appreciate it. Your example with the movie is very useful to understand the Soviet approach. It was a real solution of the housing deficit at that time.