Bill Levitt, the father of the mass-produced houses that shape US suburbia, stated that no man who owns his own house can be a communist. Judging from the looks of Moscow, the Soviets agreed, and took to the opposite extreme of city planning ideologies. Indeed, in the ideological climate of the day, capitalist cities were regarded as products of the chaotic development of exploitative societies, and the qualitative differences between center and periphery were seen as expressive of social inequality.
Conventional Marxist wisdom dictated that material conditions determine consciousness, and Socialist architects were therefore tasked with the development of a new form for the city that would be instrumental in the substitution of individualism with collectivism. Norms and standards were drawn up for typified housing projects that would become the only type of new construction in the USSR.
Today, Russian urban space consists almost entirely of concrete panel houses of only a few types that are spread across the entire nation, making most cities look alike. Cities here have expanded outwards from the center in planned construction thrusts, and with technological progress allowing for ever higher structures to be erected, the tallest buildings stand at the very edge of the city, such that the built environment closes with a show of force. There is no gradual transition: with urban sprawl having been impossible in the absence of free enterprise, the Socialist City had no suburban state. At the city's outer limits, the landscape alters abruptly and radically.
From there it's either farmland, or industrial territories, or most likely something of an in-between nature that I like to think of as 'nothing.' Passing the last city block you enter a void where, except for hardy shrubs or marshland grass, the soil is barren. The earth is punctured and scathed by prematurely abandoned ground works, and littered with nondescript waste. Dogs growl hoarsely at your heels and apprehensive watchmen defending last strongholds monitor your moves with suspicion. Here is a suspended state of being awaiting definition, a post industrial brownfield condition that might pass as a pre-urban state in expectancy, with scattered tracts of half-bulldozed land, earth touched upon but not developed, not claimed for any conclusive purpose. A kind of No Man's Land separating reinforced-concrete Civilization from Nature, a hinge between constructed and natural environment, a frontier zone of temporary indecision.
By repeatedly crossing the micro-districts that border on, and are the cause of, the brutal pattern of earthy scar tissue surrounding Moscow, my awareness of this city altered. I felt captivated by its monotony of shape and color, its stark revoke of individualism, and its Modernistic street-phobia - that denial of the social value of the street as fundamental element of urbanism. I was by turns puzzled and thrilled by the bizarre and raw rhythms of the randomly dispersed housing blocks that fail to create streets and boulevards in any definable sense. The whole suddenly seemed to result from a sophisticated creative system embracing both controlled chance and even failure.