Happy Days in the USSR

...In this country, where the persistence of major social problems is generally agreed upon, meaning is offered by the search for solutions, and the goals of the planners represent the acknowledged problem turned inside out: The existence of poverty makes one goal the better distribution of the material benefits...

...to encourage cultural pluralism...

...The temptation to draw from the "ideal" a sheaf of inferences as to the actual quality of Russian life and the aspirations of the Russian people is almost irresistible...

...Any suggestion that men need to exercise restraint, if they are to contend with the discontents imposed by any social order, is regarded as repressive...

...Standardization on such a broad scale, it is maintained, would reduce the technical engineering problems so markedly that a great release of energy would follow, and could be applied to design innovation and variety...

...This process takes place, the planners contend, through voluntary associations to which they will give a physical habitation...

...to embolden each man's sense of participation in the governance of his life...

...Mere experience of life and paternal or maternal sentiments are not enough to equip a person to teach correctly a member of society...

...We have, in the United States, got into the habit of believing that migration to the big cities results from the search for improved economic opportunity...

...What will do it—reading Pushkin aloud at the club...

...Accordingly, the residential complex is planned with enough apart-mint house concentration to produce an elementary school population...

...It also demands that they show a specific disposition and love for teaching children of a particular age...

...Perhaps people move in the search for meaning...

...Several of these larger sectors would then combine to form a 100,000-person module...

...But why, then, should it be characteristic of planned Socialist development as well...

...There are no class problems, no status and motivation problems, no governmental or political problems, no race and nationality problems, no problems arising from the inevitable conflict between local and general wishes and needs...

...But to the Russian planner, who must professionally regard all social problems as solved, the question of what people do when there are no more problems to solve must be answered every day...

...Yet something seems to be missing from the picture...

...Where there is no conflict—and in this ideal city its nonexistence is a postulate—some substitute meaning will have to be provided...

...To explain their conclusion, they discuss and dismiss two traditional "justifications" for public child-care institutions: The first, that such institutions are necessary to relieve overburdened parents, is deemed archaic because of the constant growth of leisure time...

...the second, that children should be isolated from "bad" parents, is ruled inadequate because as Communism emerges from its present transitional phase, and as the recommended educational system emerges with it, the number of bad parents will be too small to worry about...

...and ultimately, to expand the opportunities for choice...

...One busies oneself with cultural life, or one visits one's children at the child care institution, and makes sure they are being raised by proper scientific personnel with the proper orientation...

...At the same time that he worries about what will give meaning to Russian life in this idealized city, however, the American reader must remember that the refusal to admit the existence of social problems does not eradicate them—just as our own planners' enthusiasm in discussing social problems will not forever be accepted as a substitute for taking forceful action to solve them...

...Described as a New Unit Settlement (NUS), this module would be uniform throughout the Soviet Union, a standardization of construction technology that would facilitate the production of prefabricated components...

...falls far short of them...

...to facilitate the movement of goods and people with minimal impact on the human environment...

...The Russians base their entire urban design theory on the need to find an adequate means of training the young to adapt to the emergent final form of the Communist state...

...But the major emphasis of the Russian planners is not on the egalitarian goals so lovingly described by American planners, and surely not on the governmental structure of the locality...

...If we may believe the planners, Soviet society is entirely free of the difficulties that dog and bedevil their American counterparts...

...American planners operate on the premise that men, being born essentially good, respond favorably to the harmonies of a favorable environment...

...It demands that responsible persons be able to apply such disciplines to specific situations and that they be experienced in doing so...

...The very mention of training rings antidemocratic...

...They are, they tell their readers, trying to maximize the access of all Americans to an acceptable level of goods and services...

...But the fact that American planners do not discuss human adaptation and restraint does not mean that Americans are naturally socialized to their environment...

...Crucial to Soviet planning is the notion of the "club" at the center of the NUS, for in the process of adjust-in...

...Assembling groups of elementary school subneighborhoods, the planners would design population units large enough to support secondary schools...

...The cultural center will provide "a proper place and time" for the "social life of the masses—their gatherings and parades, their festivals and feasts...

...The Russian planners believe that in bourgeois capitalist society people are so intent on nurturing "individuality" that mass production is skimped...

...Mere industrial development cannot determine the form of residential settlement because, as they put it, "analysis of the production process does not tell us anything about the character or scale of desirable residential construction...

...The club fulfills the Communist party policy—outlined in its 1960 program—of "distributing cultural institutions through the whole of the nation and raising the cultural life of small towns to the level of the great cities...

...on the other hand, unlike the Russians, American planners make few suggestions, perhaps none, as to how their fellow citizens will learn to exercise the responsibilities that will follow the achievement of the objectives...

...In addition, the planners set forth a four-stage cultural development program, including informal lectures, the making of reports, cultural participation in regular courses, and finally the establishment of professional societies...

...This last phrase suggests the Soviet hierarchy fears—as the recent history of Leningrad attests—that the major cities of the nation will continue to attract population growth, despite the best efforts of the planners to ordain otherwise...

...The six planners who wrote this book opt for a system where all children are raised publicly...

...These qualifications mean that those engaged in raising the next generation must truly have a pedagogical vocation and be scientifically trained...

...to conserve the physical environment from deterioration...

...Possibly these happy assumptions —reflected in the absence of planning targets to eliminate the difficulties—are no more truly representative of Russian life than the impression of life in the United States to be derived from a quick reading, if such a prodigious feat is possible, of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners...

...Reviewed by Roger Starr Executive Director, Citizens' Housing and Planning Council of New York, Inc.: author, "The Living End: The City and Its Critics" HERE COME the Russian city planners, six of them, writing a slim volume titled, in English, The Ideal Communist City...

...Perhaps the movement to the cities is not so much economic as psycho-social...

...And they suggest that no citizen should have to walk more than 500 yards from his apartment home (in the Russian plan, single family houses are out) to the nearest convenience shopping or to public transportation that will take him to the nearest job center, major shopping hub, or to his (I will explain its meaning later) "club...

...The articulation of these goals suggests that the U.S...

...the individual to the social order it picks up where the school system left off...

...The authors of The Ideal Communist City do not seem to regard planning as the articulation of social goals...

...This task requires educators with a great deal of biological, psychological, medical, aesthetic, and other sorts of training...

...I suspect that Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, among others, would be puzzled by this description of urban America...

...with no children at home, there is no need of separate rooms for them...

...The apartment houses for adults can thus be planned around undifferentiated family spaces...

...The children will live not at home but in school dormitories...

...In striking contrast to the Russians...

...The authors' argument for public child care rests on much broader assumptions: ". . . in the present formative stage of Communism, society is seriously concerned with child rearing and with the competence required of those involved...

...American planners are busy asserting the goals of their activities...

...They do, of course, give cursory attention to such familiar planning goals as making cities look better...

...Instead, they place their emphasis on the very subject which, as I have pointed out, American planners must as a matter of principle ignore...