ABSTRACT
This chapter probes the historical origins of the present-day emotional attachment to prefabricated apartment blocks, known as khrushchevki, built in the late 1950s–1960s. It focuses on “care,” a richly multivalent word that encompasses material and mental work, love and maintenance, affect and action. Combining analysis of authoritative contemporaneous representations in the Soviet media of the 1960s with archival records of local organizations and with oral history, it explores the exercise of care in relation to architecture and democracy, in the sense of participation. It argues that care for the environment of public housing motivated participatory urbanism, underpinning a limited exercise of democracy at the most local level and fostering a sense of community and attachment to place.
