But think of the landlords!

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• Dayroom7485@lemmy.world ⁨58⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  A spot in one of those 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. www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165160850

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• Aljernon@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world ⁨29⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Most of the issues with this era of housing projects stems from the fact that the plans for upkeep were abandoned. Most of the buildings themselves were solid and very modern and with the right maintenance they would’ve been in much better condition than they are now.

    The buildings that have received that care and attention still look great. Not all the areas were well planned but most of the time they’re fine.

    And that’s without constraining that judgement to Russia specifically. Many of the countries that built like this were very ambitious but the ambition faltered with time as the resources allocated to maintenance were used for other things.

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• slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Right wing architecture

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  • captain_oni@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    More right wing architecture

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    • Sunflier@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Just one more lane!

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  • Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I fuckinf hate stroads.

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  • Taldan@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I hate it. Feels so restricting. Cant go anywhere without driving, and evenbdriving a block is a huge pain in the ass because of all the traffic and traffic control

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  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That is a lot of gas stations and signs for them

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    • slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Free market 🇺🇸🦅🙏

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• Armand1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  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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  • yucandu@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    No comrade, nice looking things are bourgeoisie decadence.

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• REDACTED@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ahh yes, the famous left wing authoritarian centric planning government Soviet Russia

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• Rooty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  They’re called commieblocks if they’re affordable to the average person. If not, they’re “highrise apartments”

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  • tomiant@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.

    I am so happy I’m not alone seeing it. Modern “development” is such a massive scam, in every country it seems like. It’s the new equivalent of logging or mining barons- they buy up land, build shit on it, sell it overpriced, wash their hands and move on to the next project with little regard for long term urban city planning.

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    • Slotos@feddit.nl ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Soviet development that was driven purely by economic considerations tends to have all the issues of modern development. Well, except car centric planning, but we know why that wasn’t a consideration ever.

      Apartment complexes that didn’t focus just on economy, tended to be way better. And that is missing from modern considerations almost always.

      Still, there’s a reason pre-Soviet areas to this day remain some of the most sought out ones.

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• Allero@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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: 1000103747 1000103748

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  • saltesc@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ugh. Disgusting.

    Give me a single structure on a plot of land, 10ft from my neighbours walls, and a lawn to maintain, any day I live for the additional costs on the place I never spend the best hours of my day in. Worth every gallon of commute fuel. My brain is so aerodynamic.

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    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This, but unironically. People suck, give me distance. I’ll let the lawn die.

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  • ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yep, my building hasn’t had a good amount of care in a while but the one right next to it has recently and it looks just fine.

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• SigmarStern@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  High rise apartments in Seoul Meanwhile in famously communist South Korea…

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  • ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ah, the beauties of capitalism.

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    • SigmarStern@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Stayed in an probably illegal Airbnb in a Samsung apartment in Jeju 10 years ago. It was nice. Apartment complexes are not bad. We have to them in beautiful Switzerland too. If the building is well maintained and the surrounding is full of greenery, and local shops, and entertainment, then they are a valid option and I’d prefer them over sprawl and cul-de-sacs.

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  • Siegfried@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    South korea is speedrunning into a scify dystopia

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• irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they’d be pretty damn great, as far as skyscrapers go.

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    • irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The blocks usually have a lot of green areas (that’s why most of the pictures are from winter, they look gloomier). They were designed to be lived in.

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    • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Dumb question, I know some places where they build quick and ugly and a few decades later they just remodelled the façade to make it pretty an modern. but those are small residential buildings in places where I lived. do you know of places where that happened in large projects like the picture?

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    • asret@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Looks like the ones in the picture are already surrounded by green spaces - they’re probably already pretty great as far as skyscrapers go.

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  • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And that is just the façade, some places renew the façade every few decades to keep the place fresh and desirable.

    the benefits of high density urban design are also amazing and I assume I do not need to list them here. this is lemmy and I just need to wait for the appropriate autist to list them all.

    And how is it controversial to build housing for everyone, instead of some pretty houses for those who can afford it.

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  • Taldan@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    These blocks look very different as a person on the street. They mostly only look bad from above where you can see all of them together

    We have some burtalist apartment buildings in Minneapolis. They’re generally desirable apartments

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  • SealofLove@leminal.space ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Nah man. I lived in Russia most of my life and commie blocks are as depressing as they look on those pictures. You have a point that some are poorly maintained, but that’s not some, that’s most of the country. Just a mass of featureless grey blocks. Dirty, ugly and inescapable. About them being good quality on the inside is debatable. The flats are small and I could hear my neighbors all the time. Some of them used to be painted, but the paint is peeling off, only hylighting the ugliness. There’s very little upside to them in the modern world.

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• kurikai@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  take notice of your capitalist car park next time you go to big box centre. more depressing than housing

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• phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    In my country this type of building came about in a society where many lived in wood sheds without electricity or running water. Where people shared outhouses with their neighbors in the yard of actual residential buildings.

    The architecture of the time homed huge amounts of people with running water, indoor toilets and electricity. Indoor heat without needing a fire.

    I appreciate them immensely.

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  • AlexLost@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It was built cheap and efficiently, not to please the eye. It could certainly be better, and we know that our environ plays a bigger role in our outlooks than we did before. If they built it today, it would have a few more trees and green spaces but would maintain it’s very essence, which is a large domicile to house people for cheap.

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    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Also correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t a lot of these have murals and shit painted on them back in the day. Could’ve sworn I’ve heard about these building having their outer paint stripped only to reveal a mural or mosaic.

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• JackBinimbul@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Any housing that isn’t exclusively for billionaires is ‘left wing’.

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  • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s left-wing in that it provides cheap housing for many. It also looks very brutalist and is reminiscent of USSR housing blocks.

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  • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s “left wing” because the buildings are identical, because they were built through central planning.

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• RidderSport@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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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  • Flauschige_Lemmata@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Photographing them in summer also helps

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• renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Also seriously who gives a shit about how it looks, it’s a place to live. I’ll take one of those apartments please, I can’t afford to buy a fucking condo for $500K, and that’s all they build now because that’s what makes them most money. So tired of this bullshit.

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    • asret@lemmy.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Looks matter because it’s a place to live. Many commieblocks deal with that just fine by having the green space around them though. I kind of like the look of some of them though - solid, practical, maintainable. Some of the modern builds in my local city look more like temporary emergency shelters - like the people staying there don’t belong.

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    • galaxy_nova@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      500k? Dang that’s a bargain!

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Who could’ve guessed, low-cost housing doesn’t look fancy!

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• nexguy@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The only thing more depressing than left wing architecture is right wing architectureImage

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  • slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Looks like concept art from Anno 2070… And I don’t mean that in a good way.

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  • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As someone who loves watching megaprojects, it is so sad that it is mostly a right wing vanity thing.

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• DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Has anyone seen the cat?

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• Daerun@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This litterally looks like any neighbourhood build in Spain in the 60s.

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  • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hey if you need a lot of housing real quick utilitarian designs like this tend to come about, doesn’t really matter who is doing it. Hell the Romans had some prefab designs that had a passing resemblance to this.

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    • AniZaeger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Except that if the Romans actually built high-rises, the damned things would probably still be standing.

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• Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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• karashta@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I hate our society’s fixation with ugly utilitarianism. We could be making beautiful things for all of us

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  • Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They’re too hard to regulate. Grey square boxes are good for the poor! You’ll see! Trust us. We’re totally not stupid

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• MasterNerd@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • TurboToad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Yes, additionally utilitarian architecture like this can easily painted in lively colors to make it look nicer. Imo this also would make a big difference with minimal costs

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• BillyClark@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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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  • gens@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is historically because urbanization. It may look to you because sexism or whatever, but that’s because you see sexism everywhere.

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  • jaybone@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Are you saying the USSR did not educate their women? (As a means to further population growth?)

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• criss_cross@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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• SuluBeddu@feddit.it ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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• chaosppe@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  lists one way of doing a thing “This is the only way of doing that thing!!”

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• turdas@suppo.fi ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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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  • tomiant@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    We lived in similar housing back in the 80’s, and the surrounding area was nothing but lovely greenery and forests, by design. Then the 00’s came around and they privatized everything, sold the apartments, and cut down all the greenery. I don’t know why, it’s just something they do, like, they had to create low income jobs somehow and decided the best way is to equip parks&rec with chainsaws and just go around and cut shit down to validate their own existence.

    Now everything is barren concrete, and it looks way more like actual grey communist dystopia than it did before. Go figure.

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    • flandish@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      privatized everything

      Capitalism will do that. It sucks.

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    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s so fucked up. I hate when asshole cut down trees.

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• CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  homelessness

  Data centers, that empty parking lot outside the abandoned mall, deportation camps…

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• JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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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  • teuniac_@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It also just looks this way from a drone shot. It’s very different when you walk around there.

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• TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Funny enough, despite the ugly aesthetics, there is a great sense of community in social housing.

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• Quokka@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  American suburbia.

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