Urban Planning for Social Shaping

For John, BLUF:  There are no innocent government actions.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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At a blog site named New Geography there is a look at Soviet Urban Development, "Looking Back:  The Ideal Communist City.  The author is Ms Alicia Kurimska.  But, this can't just be the Soviet Union.  Examine this photo from the article.

When I first saw it I thought Hahn Air Base, Germany.  I remember driving through Hahn, visiting friends, when we were stationed in Germany. It was one of a number of US bases, all pretty much alike, built by a French Contractor who had won a NATO bid to provide new bases for American Air Force Wings as far back in Western Germany as possible.  Turns out to be a photo from Tallinn, Estonia, which was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1939, only to become independent again after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Here is the lede:

Over time, suburbs have had many enemies, but perhaps none were more able to impose their version than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In its bid to remake a Russia of backward villages and provincial towns, the Soviets favored big cities – the bigger the better – and policies that were at least vaguely reminiscent of the “pack and stack” policies so popular with developers and planners today.

Urban planning isn't just about creating a livable city, it can include efforts to shape the population.

As is sometimes asserted by urbanists today, the new socialist cities were about more than mere economic growth; they were widely posed as a means to develop a new kind of society, one that could make possible the spread of Homo sovieticus (the Soviet man). As one German historian writes, the socialist city was to be a place “free of historical burdens, where a new human being was to come into existence, the city and the factory were to be a laboratory of a future society, culture, and way of life”.

Or preserve things, as when a neighborhood group fought to limit the penetration of the Lowell Connector into a local neighborhood, and won.  Well, they won, but I am not sure the rest of us did.  Why couldn't the highway designers have elevated the Connector and made more available space underneath the freeway, including space for local children to play?

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff