HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT PIGEONS

If someone walking by, falls over that, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

They keep the homeless at bay, but wait until the Ayurveda Yoga crowd discovers them. They'll be worse than a pidgeon infestation.

The last one is an actual safety hazard. Imagine someone slipping and falling (think icy sidewalks) and taking one of those to the face.

i think the things on the green bench might be anti-handholding or anti-cuddling things instead. you know, to aid against the display of lewd activity in public (/s)

Oh they sweep those at least weekly.

That's my Canada goose brain talking. 😆🪿 It's literally the common term used to refer to the total area of a housing unit. Here for example a major real estate firm explains the importance of square footage measurement.

For extra entertainment, this is a handy flowchart of Canadian units of measurement:

I would measure my apartment in square meters, but I've realized I would use the phrase "square footage" to refer to the surface area of a living space. Is there an alternative? "Square meterage" doesn't work.

In Germany?

Same here. I guess different people like that but I cant be around that many people.

Pandemics happen easier because of dense populations too.

They put butt-plugs on those posts?

Very odd to call things like that right-wing given they are most notable for being built in cities. Places well-known for being lefty.

Yeah my parents did crack in these blue tents, so nostalgic

The plattenbau buildings tend to be simpler due to the standardized, factory-made concrete panels they're built from. That said they can be built extraordibarily quickly. These days, modern building methods and the availability of building equipment like concrete pump trucks allows for similar speeds. In the 50s, coming out of the war, the speed of construction of prefab panel buildings was revolutionary. It's how large populations in the Eastern Bloc went from living in precarious conditions to having a 20th century standard of housing amenities.

Exactly, brustalism is used usually during poor times

Didn't anyone think to scatter a few evergreens around?

E.g. a few pine and yew trees would be nice.

They mixed residential, industrial, and commercial.

/original Sim City had color-coded zones

I've lived my whole life in and around commie blocks and I do not share your sentiment. My blocks are colorful with massive murals painted on their sides making each unique. The green spaces in between also help a lot, there are nice playgrounds for the kids, outdoor gyms etc. All the commodities I need are very close to my living space. I have not seen a single space in my city that looks like one in the picture even though we do have a lot of commie blocks standing around. Although I must say that the city isn't taking enough care of our buildings. While mine and most others around are holding up fine there's one that looks like it has rotted over the years. It is really starting to ruin the atmosphere but it's just an odd one out and I hope proper steps will be taken in the future to restore it back to it's shape.

You're seeing the commieblocks 35 years after the dissolution of the country that built them, and likely 50-70 years after their construction. Anything that old without proper maintenance looks like shit.

commercial ads in public spaces should be banned. they are an eye-sore. source: personal experience

Yeah it’s a little bit cheating to talk about Vienna, but they have been doing a lot of things right. Seems that’s buckling under pressure a bit though. More private buildings, reducing the top tax rate - hopefully doesn’t turn into the failed neoliberal ideology from the 80s.

I’ve only seen it through rose tinted glasses of a tourist, but the city seems lovely. I would quickly consider living there if the opportunity presented itself.

Not completely right. The main reason for panel construction wasn't war reconstruction, it was rapid industrialization. The USSR in 1929 had 80+% of peasants working the land with a horse or with their hands. By 1970, it was a fully industrialized country with a majority urban population. This required the construction of housing for over a hundred million people over the span of a few decades.

Compare that to England, France, the USA or Germany, which had a few centuries to develop the cities together with their industry since the industrial revolution.

Now compare the housing in the USSR in 1970 with that of Brazil in 1970. The USSR in 1929 was actually less developed than Brazil.

image source: https://thehill.com/...

I had a friend who lived in one of these (but in Canada), he said that when he first moved in they gave him a brochure that had like 5 pre-approved trees in it and he had to pick one. Also one time he was a day or two late cutting the grass (in a fenced-off backyard that you can't even see from the back lane) and one of his next door neighbours reported him and the HOA came round to his house to bother him about it.

Bleak

Until we live in Iain Bank’s imagination, that is. I should have clarified

This is functionalism. There is none of the architectural expression of brutalism here.

It always kills me to see a tower with 200 units, 200 air-conditioners, and presumably 200 water heaters.

These sort of housing projects popped up in many parts of the world and sometimes they definitely were needlessly austere. Better than nothing though. A lot better.

Rows of uniform monotonous rectangles made of concrete. Even a coat of paint and some color would be more pleasing on the eye but I'm not sure you could reasonably paint concrete and get it to last thru Russian winters.

At the time I was researching the technology and doing the maths, 20 years ago, I was mostly smoking Power Plant. High beta-pinene. Sharp clarity.

"Roads? Where we're going... we don't need... ... "roads"." -- Doc Emmett Brown, Back To The Future trilogy.

significantly harder and more expensive to build, but you also have significantly more water intrusion issues, meaning the building won’t last nearly as long and will require horrifically expensive fixes on the regular.

This sounds like the kind of argument I hear against spaceships for everybody, that's basically like "We can't have spaceships! Screen doors don't work in space!". Yeah, well, don't build them like that.

[Edit: Also sounds like people complaining about indoor plumbing, not understanding what that meant, imagining poop all over the place inside. No. We have tubes to manage where stuff goes. Ample dry clean space.]

Go build yourself a house that is a forest archology-scape,

:3

A house that is a forest arcology-scape... lol... just one house, going from horizon to horizon, with vast layers big enough to fit giant trees in... just a house? Seems more than a little opulent-overkill.

And, by myself? :3 If I had the resources, I would not do it just for myself.

Also, I did draft a small example (and even 1000 variations) of a largely self-sustaining house, using environmentally friendly materials, that would strengthen over time, and as intended to be lived in would increase in capacity to produce food and energy over time, and I was enslaved to do this design work while at my worst health, under promise I'd be put in it, if I'd only design a house fit for my needs, then, after much blackmail, slavery, and torture, they defrauded me, and built a design that inverted every key design element for my health, turning a healing home into a torture box, and what's worse, it cost them at least twice as much. ... I still don't really know why they did that. Can only presume some kind of sadistic narcissistic Munchhausen-by-proxy. Gets me wondering how much more human potential is being squandered for utterly insane reasons. By this worse-than-Sisyphusian task, I have envied Gregor Samsa. ... And I shall recover enough health, and build it properly, and more, yet.

Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive.

You're kidding, right? That's insanely farcical. Not even funny. If we've availed the means to build forest arcologyscapes, you think this makes housing building more scarce and expensive? I would love to hear your reasoning behind that, correct or incorrect. I wonder where your're presuming screen doors. Like... concrete? LOL. Or perhaps unimaginatively in cognitive dissonance presuming aspects of the current economic paradigm would persist along side the deployed ability to construct vast linked forest arcologies...?

Also, just the same as we don't have to increase the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions, nor fill that capacity, and that's just an example to illustrate some of the headroom we have with proper resource management, we don't have to make everything on earth a forest arcologyscape.

Anyhoo, please don't be put off by my reflexively scoffing incredulity, and do elaborate on how "Making everything a forest archology-scape is a great way to make housing even more scarce and expensive". You might be right. I wouldn't want to be barking up the wrong tree. (Pun not intended, noticed, and did nothing to avoid.)

Don’t be an idiot. Leftist housing looks like mass manufactured concrete and gyprock, supplemented by packed earth where appropriate, and probably some cardboard/glass/LDPS. At least for the next half a millenia or so.

Wanting to be approximately decent doesn’t overcome physics.

We can build a world where people live densly and affordably without inventing fantasy bullshit.

Fun spray of fallacies there.

Starts with Ad-hominem (plausibly/presumably projection), proceeds through a lack of a constructive argument/engagement (ignoring what I said) with false dichotomy, appeal to status quo, appeal to authority, begging the question, circular argument, ... and seems like incurious arrogant naive realism, and lack of an educated mind (as in the expression "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting or rejecting it).

You assert "Leftist housing looks" only one way. ... So anarchist or agrarian housing are not "leftist" in your meaning of "leftist" (like it's only the one type) are not "leftist"? Sounds like circular argument, appeal to definition, begging the question, a cherry picking lie of omission, a false dichotomy, appeal to cynicism, reification (new term to me). and whatever else I missed. Gets me wondering if this is a case of "received opinion" that's not been introspected upon and scrutinised.

Perhaps for a more constructive argument, you could elaborate on what specifics of "physics" you think refute the possibility specific to my thought experiment I invited readers to imagine. Otherwise it looks like handwaving an appeal to authority to close the argument.

"We can build a world" amuses me, for the open positivity opening, and the limitation of just "world", because much of the suppressed technology that avails such vast construction overlaps with the technology that avails all space to us (not limiting us to just a world). Though the amusement is short lived with the rest of that sentence falling to the false dichotomy, and the dismissive presumptive strawman for the ending portion of that false dichotomy.

I look forward to your elaboration on the physics aspect of your counter-argument. Or better yet, your entertaining the idea in curiosity, engaging in the thought experiment, leaving the incurious cynical presumption behind, getting constructive in a "how can we" rather than a "stupid cant".

[Edit: PS, just for a fun extension to this, bouncing off a piece of an llm's dubious analysis, that I looked at after hastily churning out ^,

capitalist/neoliberal housing also relies on specific materials and technologies, yet its limitations are rarely framed as "physics" but as market failures or policy choices. Funny how ‘physics’ only becomes an insurmountable obstacle when discussing leftist or egalitarian housing. When luxury skyscrapers or McMansions are built, we call it ‘innovation’ or ‘market demand’—not an immutable law of nature. Why the double standard?

reminds of a fun idea asserted emphatically as an invitation to entertain in the recentmost episode of derp with kurp that "if communism didn't exist, capitalism would have to invent it" (paraphrased from memory ~ works better in original context/video/wording). ~ (albeit apparently using the newspeakified definition of "communism", obviously not as originally coined by anarchists at least 5 years before Marx usurped it and handed it over to the tankies, authoritarians, totalitarians, fascists etc to wield as a means to abuse us by).]

Yeah, they're both pretty crap compared to what they could be

Funny story, suburbia is systemic government slop that destroys individuality, too.

Yeah, I know. But these are exclusive to America and the underdeveloped world, and we're not defending that. It also has similarities with it. Europe has good housing (Though unaffordable) that isn't suburbia, but modern day commie blocks aren't exactly affordable in Russia either.

I know this, I used to live in a Stalin era house in Moscow. But Stalin's Russia had a big problem with housing, only Khrucshev fixed it. All of these things may come as a shocker to an American, but they're quite common in Europe. And it wasn't that easy to get a house, you had to wait in line for half your life and the system didn't work with a bit of corruption, like centralized systems always do. Comparing the USSR to western countries is especially bad, because western countries had no regard towards workers, and if we look at the same timeframe we could say they advanced their housing capabilities equally.

I feel like Vienna did it better. And in European cities that didn't get bombed to shit in ww2 these houses look out of place and terrible. These houses weren't build for the benefit of people, but for the benefit of production, like in good old capitalism. They often disregarded the enviroment and historic parts of the city

They are designed with productivity in mind, much like capitalist architecture, they aren't designed to be liveable.

you were there during the franco regime in spain?

Of course building them would still have a cost, but they wouldn't be sold as a commodity to create surplus value for a few pockets.

Why is ensuring housing authoritarian? Isn't the cheapest most depressing architecture authoritarian? No one says it had to be depressing and lack deicent design... unless the dictator mandates it. No true left wing design would look this bleak and forced.

Why is total efficiency left wing? Isn't maximizing profit right wing? The buildings should be built to maximize happiness of the people who, together, decide on the architecture... at the expense of profit.

And the commie blocks are really in the center of that venn diagram. The party that made them was soaked in leftist blood, but the reason they look like that is because building them fast meant people got homes faster, so they were less concerned with giving each one a unique style.

And is mostly bitterly divided between 'cool, so let's get started!' And 'we must form a committee and personality cult to do capitalist accellerationism

Who are those "cool, let's get started" leftists, and what housing did they build? Just so I can compare their housing to that of the "personality cult capitalist accelerationists".

I wonder whether the figure still holds true if we include all of the people still living with parents or in multi-family arrangements because they can't afford individual homes.

While this is sad and I agree, you cant just go shoving homeless people into empty apartments. There would need to be way more safeguards than that.

Example, you live in an apartment with 2 children and there are empty units near you. A law passes that empty apartments are fair game. A mentally ill or meth addict person moves in next to you, then 5 people move in, people are coming and going to that apartment, right as your children are coming home from school every day. How do you feel about that?

Brutalism is the architectural style of these buildings, the commenter above isn't calling them "slavery and brutality"

The PRC is fascist now? The same country that endured brutal massacres fighting fascist japanese soldiers? This is how crucial terms lose all meaning and risk getting bannalized by right-wing reactionaries.

I'm the oddball who prefers living in an apartment. It has some nice features that are difficult to find in a stand-alone house, difficult to replicate, or simply don't scale down well.

So they are living in those 'luxury' apartments. So many of those low income apartments are not very nice at all.

Because they're tiny and you cant make any noise in them (usually not allowed, and if it was id feel bad for annoying others)

Thats probably my biggest issue. I cant understand liking such small spaces and having people surrounding me watching and listening to everything i do, even if its passively. Plus, id be the one to get awful neighbors that I dread being near.

Although I do not personally feel that apartments are inherently depressing, perhaps someone who was more worried about exactly what decisions they are allowed to make about their living space might. They may be considering the lack of agency one experiences in some regards as a renter, which could make them feel as though every apartment type situation was inherently depressing.

Several of my friends have very nice apartments with natural light, grassy spaces, and close proximity to parks and essentials

Cool, where can I get an apartment like that? I have one roommate, and combined we have a budget of $1k for rent and bills.

Agreed