ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on architectural and planning critiques levelled against the Soviet post-war built environment during the last two Soviet decades. As architects of the late 1960s reflected on the construction that had occurred over the past decade and a half, they began to develop two interwoven anxieties. First, professionals began to argue that Khrushchev-era urban planning and architecture had created an atomising environment, which lacked spaces that were conducive to social bonding. Second, architects worried that the neighbourhood – and the environment of the city itself – had become dehumanised. Professionals argued that the perspectives and experiences of urban residents could not be ignored when structuring the built environment, and they denounced the increasing dominance of technology over the built environment. Architects began to search for ways to bring the ‘human element’ back into the neighbourhood. These searches led to a rejection of many of the modernist architectural principles, which had defined the internal structure of the Khrushchev-era microdistrict. In discussions that paralleled and drew from a similar disillusionment occurring in the west, Soviet architects began to look to the historic built environment as they searched for ways to create more comfortable and ‘humanised’ residential areas.
