Urban Planning in the Soviet Union

[Charles Price]

"Housing Construction in the Soviet Union", Progress
Publishers, 1974
Chapter headings:
1.The cost of building a flat in the USSR
2.The Historical background
3.Science and Organisation of building work
4.Designing accommodation in the USSR
5.Industrial building methods
6.The Aesthetics of Housing Architecture
7.Architects and Builders
8.The Future is Born Today
9.Friendly Assistance

Published in English, this is an interesting,
sometimes amusing and slightly Stakhanovite overview
("The USSR completes work on five modern flats every
five minutes"). As sovietologists would expect there
is an avalanche of numerical and tabulated data and
even a nice pull-out diagram of a pre-fab assembly
plant.

Unintentionally the book might provide today's student
with insights into the psychology of mass housing
planning in the USSR, with the dissonant but typical
blend of prominent ideology, aesthetics,
utilitarianism and soviet heroism that characterised
much of the Soviet social science.

Regards,
CP



 --- Melissa Frazier <mfrazier at MAIL.SLC.EDU> wrote: >
Dear colleagues,
>
> I have a student who wants to do a project on Soviet
> urban planning and
> architecture.  Can anyone suggest any texts he might
> look at?  He can read
> Russian but not very quickly, so I think it would
> also be helpful for him
> if possible to do some more introductory reading in
> English to orient him
> to specific Russian texts, both primary and
> secondary.  Also:  while I've
> come up with ideas for literary texts that would be
> interesting from the
> point of view of urban planning/architecture, that's
> tangential to what he
> wants to do -- he's really and art and architecture
> student and is looking
> for the history of the city and city planning
> post-1917.  Any suggestions
> would be very much appreciated and can be sent to me
> at mfrazier at mail.slc.edu.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Melissa Frazier
>
>
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