• Armand1@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    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.

  • Rooty@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

    I live in a city with neighbourhoods built during Socialism, they’re spacious, full of greenery and with important services within walkable/bikeable distance. Meanwhile we have new “urban villas”, which are drab concrete boxes with apartments that have bizzare floorplans and seem to be built for money laundering purposes.

    • tomiant@piefed.social
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      1 month 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. They are creating forced gentrification.

      • Slotos@feddit.nl
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        1 month 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.

  • kurikai@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

  • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month 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.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

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

      • 🍉 Albert 🍉@lemmy.world
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        1 month 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?

    • 🍉 Albert 🍉@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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.

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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

  • RidderSport@feddit.org
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    1 month 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.

  • JackBinimbul@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    How the hell is this “left wing architecture”?? Apartment buildings have looked like this all around the world for at least 50 years.

    • FishFace@piefed.social
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      1 month ago

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

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    1 month 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

    • no banana@piefed.worldOP
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      1 month ago

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

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

      The areas where they were erected weren’t much to look at before. The buildings today may be unappreciated but I find them lovely in a way. They’re a shadow of a society that cared for it’s citizens.

      • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        You’re forgetting the public transport availability, walkability, and facilities being part of the planning, i.e. the design was to include kindergartens, schools, hospitals, shops, etc., all not too far away to access on foot or a short commute that is regular and predictable and also easy to get to. Admittedly, it didn’t always happen, but still resulted in more liveable cities and areas than many of the new neighborhoods being built today in the same cities.

    • AlexLost@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month 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.

  • nexguy@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

  • BillyClark@piefed.social
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    1 month 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.

    • gens@programming.dev
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      1 month ago

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

  • karashta@piefed.social
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    1 month ago

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

  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month 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.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          High-rises? No. Multi story buildings some going up to six or seven floors? Yes. Plenty of them survived up until around the high medieval period but we’re starting to come down by the Renaissance, though there are some examples in Revenna Italy. It’s been about 1500 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and about 500 years since the Eastern Roman Empire, regardless of how well built that’s a long time for any tall structures, a good example is the Lighthouse of Alexandria which while a bit older was rendered ruined around the same period and subsequently scavenged from to construct something newer, much like it’s Roman counterparts.

            • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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              1 month ago

              Once you find the exact material and labor required to meet specifications, spending more to exceed them is simply wasteful.

              If you want modern engineering to build something that will last 2000 years with minimal maintaince, it’ll be expensive and kinda shitty to live in.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              Most of them did collapse and fail or were otherwise scavenged for materials and lowered a few floors. So it’s not like these were all lasting for some massively absurd timescales on average, what we have are the well built ones. We probably do have plenty of structures that will be around in a thousand years with proper maintenance, it’s just that most large scale building of comparable sizes are only about 200 years old at most, which is roughly comparable to when the larger Roman building in Gaul and Britain started to get a bit rough according to chroniclers.