@ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world
Post #152842
2026-01-24 08:31 UTC
Replies (40)
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@Zier@fedia.io 2026-01-24 15:50
Left wing? LOL. This is a Soviet Block. They are everywhere in the old USSR.
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@73QjabParc34Vebq@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-01-24 08:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM
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@kurikai@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 08:52
take notice of your capitalist car park next time you go to big box centre. more depressing than housing
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@Quokka@quokk.au 2026-01-24 08:54
American suburbia.
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@RidderSport@feddit.org 2026-01-24 08:55
When the coops that own and manage these houses hire creative architects for renovation, you can these buildings to be much less bleak looking. They mostly miss coloured paint. The gray plaster they used is what makes them look shit. Otherwise these buildings often have quite clever design in regards to natural light for all flats as well as relative quietness even when next to busy roads.
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@turdas@suppo.fi 2026-01-24 08:58
Lots of trees there. That place still looks pretty nice in the summer. A quick web search had someone say it’s Yaroslavsky District, Moscow and while I’m not entirely convinced (having trouble matching the photo to a map), in the summer it will probably look similar to the photo of Yaroslavsky District on Wikipedia.
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@BillyClark@piefed.social 2026-01-24 08:59
I’m not sure what “left wing architecture” means. Because, to me, this looks like the sort of thing you have to do when the population grows like crazy. Those tend to be areas where women have little education and little power.
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@Armand1@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 09:24
Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris. It’s kind of the China Town of Paris. It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place. If you’re curious, here it is on Google Maps I’d live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.
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@Rooty@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 09:25
They’re called commieblocks if they’re affordable to the average person. If not, they’re “highrise apartments” I live in a city with neighbourhoods built during Socialism, they’re spacious, full of greenery and with important services within walkable/bikeable distance. Meanwhile we have new “urban villas”, which are drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.
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@m3t00@piefed.world 2026-01-24 09:28
in soviet russia, apartments block you https://i.redd.it/vykv4tij5yie1.jpeg
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@renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-01-24 09:29
this is more to do with it being in moscow and built some 50 years ago, not with it being “left-wing” (whatever that means). Social housing around the world can look much better than this
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@tomiant@piefed.social 2026-01-24 09:40
“Dumb commies, they think this is better than owning your own houses and renting them out so they don’t have to work? Savages, let them live in cardboard boxes.” / the bourgeoisie
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@Allero@lemmy.today 2026-01-24 10:09
Also part of why it looks depressing is because it’s old and poorly maintained. Just a touch of renovation and the houses start looking way better:
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@CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 10:43
homelessness Data centers, that empty parking lot outside the abandoned mall, deportation camps…
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@RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works 2026-01-24 11:03
Just a reminder that the underlying problems that lead to this kind of architecture aren’t explicitly left-wing. When you were born all the land already belonged to someone else. These might be private properties, corporate owned properties or state owned properties. If you weren’t lucky enough to inherit something from your parents you are forced to live in these boxes. This problem gets worse over time. Lack of opportunities to earn enough money to buy a plot/house, paired with a lack of space in cities also contributed to the situation. It’s shit everywhere because we as humans have continuously failed to implement better solutions.
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@SigmarStern@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-01-24 12:37
Meanwhile in famously communist South Korea…
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@irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-24 12:47
Copying and pasting an old comment i made: Honestly, commieblocks arent that bad. Most of the pictures of them are cherry picked to be the unmaintained, dirty ones, and are exclusively taken in gloomy weather. The houses on the inside are usually good quality as well (though likely not well maintained anymore). Hell, if you just painted them colourfully, they’d look nice.
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@TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 12:54
Funny enough, despite the ugly aesthetics, there is a great sense of community in social housing.
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@bollybing@lemmynsfw.com 2026-01-24 13:06
If you visit the communism museum in Prague, you’ll learn all about the horrors of being under the thumb of the USSR. And then at the end you’ll see a photograph of the cottage in the countryside where Vaclav Havel and others plotted the revolution with a text explaining that, like many Czech people, Havel owned a second home in the countryside where they would often spend weekends and holidays. For all the bad, the communists did a much better job on housing than the capitalists.
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@UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2026-01-24 14:08
I think of the landlords all the time actually…
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@nexguy@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 14:16
The only thing more depressing than left wing architecture is right wing architecture
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@slaacaa@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 14:56
Right wing architecture
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@karashta@piefed.social 2026-01-24 15:10
I hate our society’s fixation with ugly utilitarianism. We could be making beautiful things for all of us
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@criss_cross@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 15:27
I actually wish they’d build more of those than the overpriced “luxury condos” people build now that no one can afford.
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@Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 16:08
People here understand that the Soviet Union had a homeless population too, right? They actually had a higher rate than the US in the 1980s.
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@SuluBeddu@feddit.it 2026-01-24 16:30
On the picture: hundreds of flats with individual windows and balcony Oh no, giving hundreds of families a balcony, how terribile! What’s next: non-shared bathrooms and kitchens?
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@Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 16:30
Semi relatedly, there’s some new blocks in my city that are both ugly and expensive to live in. It’s this soulless, almost corporate feeling type of architecture. Doesn’t fit into how the city looks at all. They had the opportunity to decide whether to build affordable housing or something pretty that aesthetically fits into the city and picked neither. No doubt the shareholders shed a tear of joy.
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@JackBinimbul@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-01-24 16:57
How the hell is this “left wing architecture”?? Apartment buildings have looked like this all around the world for at least 50 years.
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@JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2026-01-24 17:08
Those blocks might be not perfect, but they were part of a program to build housing for all those people living in quite bad conditions after the war and after everything that went through in eastern europe in the 20th century. They needed millions of homes and quick. And they might be ugly to some people, but they are better than slums and you shouldn’t take their condition today after several decades for what they were when they were new.
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@blady_blah@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 17:09
Why is this right wing or left wing housing? I guess you can maybe make an argument that this is centralized planning, trying to make the best use of the land available and that right-wing would be pure chaos where the market decides what’s going on. On so you’d have sprawl next to Mansions next to slums, next to McDonald’s, and no parks, and every single tiny piece of land has a building on it, and it all must be fully utilized trying make money in some capitalism way? Honestly, it doesn’t seem the worst way to do it from a housing density standpoint. Yes, we all want the standalone suburb house or some spot in the countryside, but that’s not the world we live in. For high density housing, this doesn’t seem that bad. Each building has a balcony and overlooks a park and has fresh air and sunshine…. How do you do this better? or is it about equality? Every unit here is equal and therefore bad? That seems a positive in my eyes. Is that really the difference here? There aren’t the ultra poor and the mega rich all mixed in together… Where the poor are in slums and the Richer mansions, is that right wing architecture? What’s the best way to build high density housing? Tall buildings surrounded by Parks seems to be the most optimal way, right? What am I missing here? The buildings aren’t pretty enough?
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@phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2026-01-24 17:36
I don’t see this as left or right wing This is architecture that could be done better. Yes, we need to stop homelessness, but you also want to avoid creating spaces where nobody wants to live because it’s ugly and depressing and guaranteed, the poor end up having to live there, and with that comes crime and what not and you end up with ghetto style areas where even police is uneasy Take a little bit more space, put a little bit more thought into the designs, add spaces for children to play, add parks, make it look nice. Wr don’t need luxury villas either, but there has to be something better than this
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@MasterNerd@lemmy.zip 2026-01-24 18:35
One interesting thing I’m noting is that picture appears to have been taken on a rather dreary winter day. I can see a lot of trees between the buildings, and I’d be interested in seeing what this place looks like in other seasons and better weather
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@Daerun@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 18:52
This litterally looks like any neighbourhood build in Spain in the 60s.
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@chaosppe@lemmy.world 2026-01-24 19:56
lists one way of doing a thing “This is the only way of doing that thing!!”
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@ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2026-01-25 00:31
Who could’ve guessed, low-cost housing doesn’t look fancy!
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@DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-25 04:57
Has anyone seen the cat?
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@REDACTED@infosec.pub 2026-01-25 07:36
Ahh yes, the famous left wing authoritarian centric planning government Soviet Russia
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@Aljernon@lemmy.today 2026-01-25 08:24
I’ve seen this posted before. Important points to consider: Imperial Russia had a housing shortage in the cities due to industrialization occurring and the existing housing was often of poor quality. According to one source: “In major cities, a significant portion of housing consisted of barracks, basements, semi-basements, dormitory-style rooms, dugouts, and semi-dugouts.” Then WW1 hit followed by the civil war and housing construction essentially stopped with some housing destroyed in the war. Then in the interwar period, priority was given to industrial construction in the USSR, resulting in low housing construction volumes, with a significant share consisting of temporary housing. Rapid industrialization and increasing population shifts to cities increasing demand. Then WW2 hit and huge amounts of existing housing were destroyed in the fighting. So the USSR was in tight spot and did the best they could with limited time and resources which for most Russians ended up being a huge improvement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_construction_in_the_Soviet_Union
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@Dayroom7485@lemmy.world 2026-01-25 09:21
A spot in one of those for a family in Berlin costs 650.000€ because of how great the non-communist economy is doing at creating affordable housing. That is 14 times for median salary before taxes, or 21 times after taxes. https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165160850
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@krull_krull@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-01-25 14:49
Just paint them some color bruh. It would do wonder.