> People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers
There's nothing about economic growth and material wealth that requires this to happen. Something else must have changed.
> It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
Most things are better as a kid, without the worries of adulthood, let alone parenthood. I'd imagine the outlook for your parents raising you in the People's Republic may have been different.
City planning looks to be better for children and perhaps average families for the reasons given. Similar projects were also built in the west, e.g. in the UK, but since they were only for poor people they suffered from inadequate maintenance, security and so on. Those either get demolished, or the green space filled in with more buildings.
> Something else must have changed.
Cars, that was the point. A one-lane access road was originally enough for deliveries, maintenance and waste removal; it would later be widened, then cars parked (legally or not) along the sides of the road or sidewalks. No one wants to sit on a bench and stare at a parked car, and the cars (parked and moving) make it more dangerous for children to play unsupervised.
Agreed. When I was a kid we used to just roam outside (let alone walking to school and extracurriculars by ourselves).
That's no longer normal at exactly the same places even if objectively it is safer now. The perception of risk must be one thing that has changed but I think there's more to it...
Safer in terms of having less crime, perhaps?
What about the danger of being run over by a car on the way to those places? Nowadays we typically have more cars, with lower visibility, driving faster than before because the roads are wider, straighter and with more lanes. It is an environment that is plainly hostile to pedestrians and children in particular.
On the other hand, biking would be definitely less pleasurable and more dangerous for smaller kids now. Even as adult I don't enjoy biking with many cars around.
I think people especially in the US are quick to dismiss the Soviet Republics while ignoring what they did get right and the alienating parts of their own culture.
What do you think bloc countries and Soviet union were? Some kind of communist utopias? They appear to "didn't have dire poverty" because "social parasitism"[0] was a criminal offense for a long time. Like, police (sorry, "militia"!) could stop you on the street during work hours and arrest you if you didn't have a document from your boss or from a doctor allowing you to skip work. In later times "undesirables" were just forcibly relocated from "nicer" places [1]. Unfortunately description of these in English are quite lacking, but as a person born in USSR I can assure you that all the nostalgia for that times is either coming from old people who actually just nostalgic for their youth (old joke on the subject: - Gradpa, why are you keep saying it was much better under Stalin? - Because I could still get an erection back then!), or intentional political propaganda.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
The people who live in St. Petersburg and Moscow today are there because none of their families/ancestors were purged.
The ones who did are in Siberia, or dead.
Not knowing they worked for the stasi…
Cramped living conditions but ample communal space, so a lot of time is spent in full view of the neighbor (so they can report anti-communist behaviors to the local police). No individuality, identical buildings with the same layout for identical cogs in the machine.
And yet when the west does this, we celebrate it as "economies of scale": https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/subdivision-aerial
(well, as long as your tiny piece of lawn stays green, your house is one of the five approved paint colors, and your HOA dues/conformity-fines are paid)
I guess to the average worker in the East, these North American housing developments must have been seen as somewhat evil and not desirable at all.
My stomach tingled just reading that, and then when I clicked the picture I felt real, panicked claustrophobia. If I believed in hell it would look like this. Maybe lots of people like living this way, but for me, no way. I'm a human. I'm not meant to be a bee living in a giant concrete honeycomb next to tens of thousands of bee neighbors buzzing around. I can't even imagine myself living that densely without having a mental break.
I have never ever seen a soviet-era suburb which didn't have 4 to 12 story buildings with parks and aisles all around them and all kind of services being at a 5 minutes walking distance top (church, shops, post office, elementary and middle school, etc).[1]
Literally under every building you would find people quietly enjoying their evening on the benches while watching their kids play all around in safety and green. All of those neighborhoods would be perfectly connected with city centers by public transport. Can't think of any of those places where from suburbs to downtown would take you more than 15/25 minutes top.
You could literally fit tens and tens of thousands of people in relatively small but very livable neighborhoods.
But cars have long ruined these kind of neighborhoods by reclaiming those places for parkings [2] (imagery is from 2017, in 2023 it is at least twice as dense in cars). People don't really enjoy their evenings chatting to each other because benches have been removed and kid playgrounds have been moved blocks away and everyone is sitting in their bunkers, uhm, homes, isolated from each other.
Maybe I might be romanticizing but honestly economical progress is such an overblown metric and progress does nothing but make people more and more lonely, anti social and unhappy. It was miles better when I was a kid in Poland.
[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/urban-area-style-soviet-peri...
[2]https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81612...