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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

it's not the parent commenter's theory, it's a well established architectural and urban planning theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park

but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.

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Wow, some of the complexes in those pictures look a lot like the cities I create when I'm playing Workers & Resources; if I didn't know any better I would have thought they were taken in the former Soviet bloc. I wonder how they managed to make it work where the West didn't.

Details matter and the Soviet examples must have got some details right that matter. The question for the reader is then what? (one answer already given is Soviets didn't give residents a choice - I have no idea if this is right or not)

the fact that they kept building them doesn't really mean it worked any better. the answer might be that it had all the same problems, they just cared less about solving those problems. the problem with towers in the park is isolation from services - in a society where services are more scarce to begin with, that's going to be less of a difference than other forms of planning.

but afaik the difference between "commieblocks" and towers in the park is that there was a lot less park per commieblock. you had more buildings clustered tighter together than the prototypical western towers in the park development.

My understanding is that the use separation wasn't nearly as strict. Some of them have markets and daycares in them, which increases the amount of people there at times that would be dead for a plain residential area.

but also, it is an artifact of the political system: crime shot up after the dissolution of the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_Soviet_Union

Western academia got pumped chock full of former soviet bloc professionals after the walls fell so a generation of urban planners and other professionals spent their education hearing a fair bit about that kind of construction and planning.

Soviet bloc told people where to live. Didn't work in the long run as the USSR collapse eventually.

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