How is densification of any good at all? Why not just develop nearby regions and move more housing and businesses there instead?
How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
111–114 of 114 posts
Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The starting comment in the thread explicitly mentions "Soviet". I cannot say much about GDR, but as for USSR, Mantas is right. Soviets controlled 100% of employment options, and restricted movements of citizens - and that was their approach to urban planning. Which in the end didn't work well anyway, as my parents waited for an apartment for more then 20 years, and finally USSR collapsed before it happened :-) By th…
Imho the GDR was just another extension of the Soviet Union, sovereign in theory only. Otherwise the "Iron Curtain" wouldn't have gone up where it did, splitting Germany in half. Of course, the GDR also saw its fair share of cronyism with all of its injustices, like they exist everywhere, but the Plattenbauten are still held in high regard by many East-Germans. Maybe the Soviet approach wasn't actually that catastrop…
To give you some idea, GDR was seen as almost totally west from USSR. Anything "made in GDR" was immediately seen as super high quality. Getting visa to visit GDR was next-to-west hard.
USSR had much worse conditions as a starting point. On top of that, it was an empire that had assimilation as one of it's goals as well as military targets to meet. Thus playing field for citizens was far from level. For example, even whole "strategic" cities were much nicer to live in that a regular cities. Better food, more exotic food options, better housing, more entertainment... You name it.
The whole approach of state-owned housing is not catastrophic. If you can build reasonably fast. USSR couldn't. After all, catastrophic productivity is what brought the red empire to it's knees. Why it was so bad is another topic though.
Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Soviet housing system...? opinions vary. Opinions vary for those who were exposed to privileged side only. In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an ap…
There were lots of things that were very bad about the eastern bloc. Freedom and rights, for a big example. As you say, people could not decide where they would live. I'm not comparing democracy to totalitarianism's merits on the moral front. I was just comparing the average GDR house, to a modern one. It's not that different, and most people lived in an apartment then as they do now. Both are similar in quality & ab…
I'm not sure about GDR, but in Lithuania Soviet housing is piss-poor. Apartments are tiny and dark, planning is crappy, heat insulation is shitty (at least renovation can somewhat fix it).. And nobody did anything for decades - just kept building same standard apartments. And even if they were shitty, they weren't building nowhere near enough of them.
On top of that, a lot of people, even families with young kids, got "dorm" apartments with shared kitchens/bathrooms/etc.
So yes, housing quality between USSR and modern housing is quite big.
Re: How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Soviet housing system...? opinions vary. Opinions vary for those who were exposed to privileged side only. In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an ap…
> Soviet housing system...? opinions vary. > In reality, most people had to wait decades for an apartment. There was an easy way to get an apartment though - get sent to bumfuck nowhere for infrastructure project (military base or factory, nuclear plant etc..). Or climb up the party ladder or get a job at well-connected company than get arrange you an apartment. I don't see how that's meaningfully different from curr…
> Pressure in the system is only useful if people react to it
Indeed. And in Soviet system, nobody reacted for decades.
The main difference is fairness of playing field. In USSR, you could try to bribe your way into good living. In capitalist system, you can work your way through. In USSR, there was much less regard for quality work. On top of that, even the well-connected&bribed 1% of USSR would barely live like US middle class. If not lower-middle. Meanwhile working yourself up to middle class is quite doable in capitalist system.