ABSTRACT
This chapter explores professionals’ critiques of the microdistrict (mikroraion), the neighbourhood-like urban formulation that became the central building block of Khrushchev’s housing construction programme. By the 1970s, many architects, urban planners and sociologists had begun to recognise the microdistrict’s failures in its social objective of strengthening community relations. Architects and sociologists argued that positioning the microdistrict collective as the basic social unit of the Soviet city, as Khrushchev’s housing programme had endeavoured to do, did not align with the realities of contemporary urban life. These critics supported their arguments with empirical sociological data as well as sociological theory, which emphasised the importance of personal choice and agency in determining the structure of residential social life. To determine how best to organise social life, architects considered two central questions: what form should the socialist collective take, and should it be territorially organised around the residential unit? Their progressive disillusionment with the microdistrict signalled a reconsideration of the spatial nature of social relations under developed socialism: the notion of physical collectivity, defined according to territorial proximity, gave way to a de-territorialised and psychologically oriented conceptualisation of collectivity.
