Bill Levitt, the father of mass-produced US suburban homes, stated that no man who owns his own house can be a communist. Judging from the looks of Moscow, the Soviets agreed. 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 and privatism with collectivism. Intensive studies resulted in norms and standards for typified housing projects that would become the only type of 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 the city, such that the built environment closes with a show of force. There is no gradual transition: since urban sprawl was impossible in the absence of free enterprise, the Socialist City has 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 the soil is barren save for hardy shrubs or marshland grass. The earth is punctured and scathed by prematurely abandoned ground works, and littered with nondescript waste. Dogs growl hoarsely at your heels and watchmen defending last strongholds measure you up in apprehension and suspicion. Here is a suspended state awaiting definition, a post industrial brownfield sort of condition that might double 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 with symbolic aspirations of its own.
I decided to go and investigate that outer Zone where concrete rips and
tears up the earth. By repeatedly crossing the micro-districts that border
on, and that are the cause of, the brutal pattern of earthy scar tissue
surrounding Moscow, I became differently conscious of the city I live
in. 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 the urban structure.
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 clear urban idea. The whole suddenly seemed to result
from a sophisticated creative system embracing at once controlled chance
and even failure.
Bee Flowers
A great resource on post-Stalinist Soviet urban planning is the issue 'Microrayon' of the English-language architecture journal Project Russia.