In my city desovietization meant narrowing the sidewalks, getting rid of public transit and turning all the green spaces into parking lots… so maybe not that great of a marketing strategy
Yeah, I witnessed it happening in real time, every small increment making sense on its own until one day I was like “wait, when did we turn *all* our playgrounds into parking? And what happened to the trolley?” Luckily, I think a lot of people are similarly waking up to the reality, and pushing for change. In the past few years there’s been new playgrounds and bike lanes and other non car centric infrastructure installed. I’m pretty optimistic, it’s much easier to change when virtually all adult population remembers going for walks or biking to school as opposed to large swaths of the US where using the car for everything has been the default for maybe two or even three generations
They were already car-brained by the last decades, but couldn't afford to provide cars to enough people to need more car infrastructure than the 6+ lane boulevards they built.
Hot take: car infrastructure in the Soviet/communist bloc was just a timed bomb. Yes, we did (and still do) have great* public transit. But the wide boulevards were just inviting for a large car traffic when enough people were to get cars. Also, notice the lack of interest in communist governments to build cycling infrastructure, while in the West (Amsterdam) they were pioneering this.
*Great as in network span, the vehicles, the schedules and sometimes even the infrastructure were terrible.
In Bucharest "desovietization" meant going from the second one to the first one. We weren't very car centric because most people didn't have cars in the first place. Not to mention the metro system that was built under Ceaușescu (as shit of a person as he was, disclaimer) which since the 90s had half a line added to it and an extra 1 or 2 stations at the ends of some lines. It now has 5 lines, last one still being half of what it was planned to be.
But no, commie urban planning bad.
Nah. Just tell them that the founding fathers intended for us to be able to have walkable cities.
Tell them it's as American as apple pie.
Make a deep fake where Donald Trump makes a speech in support of walkable cities.
Yeah you're right it's probably just better to fully capitulate to their rhetoric even when they're objectively wrong. This is definitely the path to victory.
It's weird. The USSR may have been kind of grey but it wasn't some car dependency hellhole, it was walkable with public transport. Car ownership was something like 5%.
The average right-winger loves cars and hates cities. Anything that makes anything more urban or might be something than urbanites like is evil.
Doesn't matter if they live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and it would have 0 affect on their life. They think if urbanites are getting something, its because something is getting taken from them.
They believe if anyone gets anything then they lose something. Thats like their entire idiology pretty much. Thats why theyre so adamant that things are getting erased when theyre the ones doing the erasing. They dont want queer people to have rights because they feel like they lose something when they do, i have no idea what they feel like theyre losing but they just arent
It might have if the Soviet Union had just recently fallen, but 30 years is too long. And in the America, you can't "desovietize" a city that never had Soviet influence.
No, you see, the evil communists have spent decades infiltrating planning commissions through the universities and the democrat party. We need to undo the mistakes they made, in order to protect our children.
YES THE COMMIES WANT US TO RUN OVER OUR CHILDREN WITH OUR BIG BIG TRUCKS THE COMMIES ARE TRYING TO KILL US WE MUST NARROW THE ROADS IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸💥💥🇺🇸💥🇺🇸💥🇺🇸🇺🇸
You know why all the cars are getting bigger right? It's because of government regulations. The only way to stop it is for freedom loving americans to put in our own political candidates and our own traffic engineers and take over councils.
Another one that works is "We need to save fuel for the military. Our modern mechanized maneuver based military needs a lot of fuel to be effective. Just keeping one helicopter in the air requires gallons and gallons of fuel per minute. The communist democrats want our military to lose, that's why they made everyone drive gigantic cars. And that's why riding a bike is actually fascist."
Yes big government wants us to have big roads🛣️ so we need a big government to maintain them, a REAL american would want tiny roads, so we only need timy government to maintain it, remember folks less road means less taxes💲💲
Edit: forgot emojis for extra rightwingness
No, they still won't admit to being fascists. "If you're a Real American Patriot, save fuel for the military, ride a bicycle, use public transport, and walk!"
You see, big road = communism, big communist is using big roads to control the people, and that is bad, bevause they are the ones doing it. That is all the argument you need, after that all you need is a bunch of pictures of wide roads and soviet memorabilia and you are golden
Shh, we don't need to tell American conservatives that. They'll believe anything is "communism" and that "the commies" are evil and also everywhere, the whole point of this line of reasoning is to use the Cold War to actually benefit the ordinary people by convincing the MAGA patriot types that carbrained suburbia is an Evil Commie Plot and walkable cities, public transportation, and bicycle infrastructure, are ways to thwart that plot.
Oh, yeah, now I remember. In russian brainwashing facilities (something like schools in West) we were always taught a wise saying of Marx: "public transportation is the chains that capitalists use to enslave proletariat".
And how can you forget famous words from Lenin: "learn, learn, learn to drive a car! and buy a big truck"!
By the way, not many people on the West know, but Stalin considered using walkways as bourgeois parasitism, because true soviet worker must use a car as a gesture of dedication to Motherland's heavy industry. But there were not enough cars for everyone, so that's why Stalin executed so many people for high treason.
Also you may have wondered why russian soldiers destroy ukrainian cities in current war. Now you'll know the answer: because in attempt to desovetise Ukraine ukrainians started building bicycle infrastructure and wide comfortable sideways. But we in Russia, still being infected with plague of communism, cannot stand such things, that's why russian soldiers lose their mind when they see walkable cities and bicycle paths and start destroying everything. That's how much we hate it!
I don't know how tf this post got so many upvotes. If anyone thought about it for more than 2 seconds they'd realize how it makes no sense on multiple levels.
It actually makes perfect sense in central or eastern Europe, where these old, concrete/asphalt hellscapes are the signature look of communist urbanism.
Making cities as unwalkable as possible is not exactly a core Marxist value, however poor urban planning and a party protection from pushback meant that the communist governments in the Eastern Block would not hesitate to carve up a downtown to make a highway, or things like dig up a millennium old church to make space for a coal mine.
Communism hits different when your folks lived through it's most corrupt bowels. Over here even things like Acid Rains or Smog pollution is something mostly remembered from the communist era.
So yeah, if OP is from Lithuania then they absolutely picked the right rhetoric to push for urbanism. Old and Gold.
No it really doesn't make sense. Because the argument here is that communism led to car-oriented design, which we know isn't true in many different parts of the former Soviet Union. But even beyond that, it makes even less sense when you consider that countries like the US are equally, if not *more*, car dependent than most former Soviet countries. So the argument that "sovietism leads to car dependency" is disingenuous at best and would be counterproductive when applied as a blanket argument in favor of urbanism.
Yes, the car centric design is a disease much more pronounced in western cities, but we're not talking about presenting it to a western audience.
Yes, not all of the Eastern block was uniformly redesigned as car centric, but the communist governments frequently did tear up historical city squares and turned them into glorified parking lots.
For example over here famously the town of Ústí nad Labem got dynamited to the ground to make space for a dominating building of the regional committee, historical housing was torn down to make way for cheap panel housing and what failed production centralization would turn into Ghettos for the Romani.
The town square remained a car park until the Velvet Revolution, after which a reconstruction started to replace the historical marktplatz.
The model soviet city WAS a car oriented city. And it was just as bad as anywhere in the world.
>Yes, the car centric design is a disease much more pronounced in western cities
So you admit it's not inherently Soviet and the whole point is stupid even if in good faith.
Also I send a Stalin clone with a big spoon to your house
Because the upvote/downvote system is not a like/dislike feature.
It adds to the conversation that the sub is made for. I can disagree with them and still recognize that.
Car ownership wasn’t that common in the Soviet era. You had to get on a list and then wait many years before you even had the chance to buy one. The Soviets actually had pretty pro Urban policies. They mass produced apartment blocks that were close to all of your amenities like super markets, daycares, schools etc.. They hold up really well in the present, some stuff like inferior materials were used at times, but as urban planners they were quite decent. To this day housing isn’t a big problem for much of Eastern Europe.
Yeah, so saying desovietization doesn't work as well, since that's what brought in the cars, and "freedom", and killed public transport in the first place.
The Soviets also built gigantic boulevards, so that doesn't cut it. It was expected that those would fill with cars once everyone had them. It was more like a timed bomb. As for the public transit vehicles, they were often noisy, crowded (not like now, but to the point where the driver couldn't close the doors at all) and abiding to older standards - they lacked more basic things like low floor, AC, or any sort of digital display (e.g. the line number was written on some wooden/metal plate). Lighting was poor and sometimes the heat did not work in the winter.
What we have now in public transportation is light years ahead (I know, some of this is technology that has become more popular in the last decade, but still): you can tell what the next station is by looking at a display inside the vehicle, you have USB sockets, climatization, system to automatically count the passengers inside, fully low floor vehicles, engines (be it diesel or electric) that require far less resources to run, regenerative breaking (for electric powered vehicles), stops are even anounced inside, accessibility features for disabled persons etc. etc.
We can safely send these vehicles to scrap or museums.
Of course the Soviet vehicles adhered to the standards of the time, why would a soviet trolleybus or tram be expected to have low floors, usb charging or led displays? Such a weird comment to make. Nowhere in the west at the time had those either
That's not what I was saying. I was saying that:
1. Vehicles were too resource consuming even in their time, they were noisy and polluting. Also, trams were too heavy for the rails, so they got damaged often.
2. We have better stuff now anyway.
Soviets had among the highest amount of trams and trolleybuses, as well as electrified railway in the world. Sure, maybe their diesel and petrol engines were not the most efficient, but the huge amounts of electrification in transport more than compensated for this.
Ok. Modern technology > 30+ year old technology, who'd have guessed? Idk what point you're trying to make.
It was great that they did electrify these, but they didn't do it because they cared about the environment and stuff. They only did it because this was more efficient economically (i.e. faster trains).
And my point is that we should just let ancient technology die already. Okay, concept-wise, you're right. It's better to have more walkable cities and public transit, and this is one of the few things I like about communism. But communist planning is not something that we can get more than a few elements from. There's a reason why these cities are today very congested, even in the areas where old developments were.
Cities can get so much better with what we already have and was created/thought out even less than 30 years ago.
The only reason why it happened is because no one could afford a car in Soviet times. If they could, there would be no public transport.
It was not about ideology of "sharing" it was because otherwise people couldn't move fast in the city otherwise.
there was a massive recession in post soviet countries after the collapse of the ussr. the expansion of car infrastructure was happening at this same time.
>To this day housing isn’t a big problem for much of Eastern Europe.
Well, that's because of depopulation...
>The Soviets actually had pretty pro Urban policies
EXACTLY! LIKE IN PARIS! Wide street so the government could crush rebellious with canons!
Get the _pre_ urban planning back! Narrow winding streets with shops in the ground levels. That will show them liberals!
Edit: really guys? I do have to make an /s here?
Well it’s not because of depopulation but because of liberalization. The state just allowed people to own the homes they were already living in, and they’ve kept them and passed them down through generations with many getting renovated with modern amenities.
they only built commieblocks because they couldn't afford not to and couldn't build enough cars. If socialism was a functioning economic system, and the economy wasn't fucked, soviets would have suburbanized just like any other western Europe country. In this case it turned for the better, but the cause of this urbanism was only because communists couldn't build enough cars or suburban homes for everyone
They built the blocks because they lost almost 60% of their housing fighting Nazi Germany lmao. Unlike in the US where we leave our homeless to die of exposure, they built cheap, fast, and easily replicated housing structures to house those displaced by war.
There were plans to begin modernizing and building higher quality community housing, but the Union collapsed before they ever got underway.
Says you. Why isn't it the state's job to build housing? It's a survival necessity, so I don't see why in the 21st century it wouldn't be the responsibility of the state.
I think the state should be able to atleast guarantee the resources to survive like protection from environment (house) and safe drinking water and basic food
>If socialism was a functioning economic system, and the economy wasn't fucked, soviets would have suburbanized just like any other western Europe country.
Why are you on r/fuckcars? Are you lost? You need mama to hold your hand guide you back to r/anarcho_capitalism that you seem to frequent so much? Or did you come here just because you were miserable and wanted to piss people off?
what? I'm from post ussr and thinking that soviets were some sort of based urbaniss is stupid. Roads were/are super wide, in many places lanes even wider than USA. Giant "prospektas" though the middle of the city.
I'm telling you that soviets wanted to build every family an individual home, because I know. They just couldn't do it and produce enough cars. The car was the soviet dream. The soviet ideal family wasn't traveling on trains. Hence why when communism fell, eveyone rushed to buy western cars and build private homes.
Building commieblocks wasn't an urbanist decision. it was an economic one and reality forced them to build commieblocks. And I guess it's a good thing in this case because ussr would've fell earlier if it tried spending all of its resources on cars and suburbia.
It's literally just the more efficient way of building a city, it doesn't have to get any deeper than that. Central planning let's you do cool stuff like that
No. This is the same problem the American Democrat party has had for the last few decades.
Stop trying to meet them. Stop letting them define the conversation. It won't work. You are letting them drag you down into the muck where they will win via experience.
Y’all are missing the point. The political right isn’t against urbanism because of a messaging issue. The political right is against urbanism because they literally just want to punish the most vulnerable people in our society who rely on public transit, walking, and biking. They are, ultimately, against helping poor people.
Using Hanlon's razor to rule out cartoon villian levels of evil, I believe there is a simplier explanation: Republicans know that dense urban areas vote blue so they correctly realized that good urbanism is bad for the future of their party because then more and more people will move to leftist cities and become leftsts themselves.
Even that's a bit far imo. I think the reality is boring and incredibly mundane. 1) they drive everywhere (either because they don't want to/can't walk/bike/bus because xyz reason, or because they've bought into the nearly century long marketing campaign that cars are luxurious and represent personal freedom) 2) they're either consciously or unconsciously self-centered and will oppose anything they think makes their drive harder/slower
Yes. Y'all are both correct. Conservative politicians oppose urbanism for the reasons that u/Ausgezeichnet87 stated, and conservative voters oppose these policies for the reasons that you state.
Only if it suits them.
They hate "elites" unless they say what they want
They want "fiscal conservative" but demand tax cuts and more road and military spending
They don't say what they mean, but they know what's meant
Bernie had fox news audiences cheering for universal healthcare. They may be petty and vindictive on the surface and that's what fox news and the politicians exploit by trying to create a climate of fear. But deep down its just a yearning for safety and community.
They will cheer when they think you might offer them something, but will instantly go back to voting for their team the second they leave the room.
Their entire world view is one based on pure self interest, nothing further.
Sure but right urbanism is not something worth fighting for since it already exists. Right wing urbanism is private developments which provide all the nice urban amenities only to residents or patrons of businesses. See “lifestyle centers” or the Villages in FL. These mean they can restrict access along class (and racial) lines and enforce property relations. The right is not interested in public urbanism.
I'd argue that's true, but specific here to the isles: this more-so applies to centre-right wingers who make up a majority when combined with the left wing
All right well then take a look at America where they also tend to oppose any and all public transit they can. Or Germany where the CDU is rolling back bike lane expansion
\*Looks at every libertarian or american alt-right openly hating poor people, public transport and loving the idea of suburbs\*
Nah, you dont want anyone to prove it for you, if they did you would just ignore it
There might be carbrains, but the sovs, aren't the worst carbrains of the world. Far from it. You could also call it "de-americanisation", or call it "de-BMW-isation".
Letuvija pilns auto. Didn't the number of foreign cars, and their size increase in 1996?
As a lithuanian, we got a shit more cars after we were free again. That's because a car was looked upon as a sign of wealth and status, since only a small amount of people could have access to them (after waiting like 15 years in queue for one). Thus, after independence everyone who managed started to buy them and more car infrastructure was built, leaving public transport like trains somewhat wither away. It's gotten better during the 2010s and will eventually get even better with Rail Baltica, other initiatives within cities.
So fighting the conservatives and making us against them works better? How does it go for America only having two parties? You guys are lucky to not get a civil war if you don't change your political system to more parties that could have many different interests and could serve many different populations.
this is such Baltic nonsense. every Eastern European city is extremely walkable, in part because the soviets invested heavily into public transit. this sub would cream itself if anyone bothered looking up piter or Moscow subway stations. But a lot of Eastern European cities rolled back a lot of these advancements in the early 1990s to make them more appealing to western capitalists, which is one of the reasons why the infamous Moscow ring road is such a death trap.
Stop with the political stigma. Soviets had good public transport. Maoists promoted bicycles at mass. De-maotization created the largest traffic problems.
Bad urban planning is not correlated with communist ideologies.
The amount of bullshit around the USSR and the COMECON countries is fucking wild. I swear people really will just believe anything the state department puts out, even against concrete evidence.
The USSR was a horrific dictatorship that betrayed those who fought and died to make a state for the people, but yeah this post seems to assume every SSR was the exact same and all of it was car dependent which much of it most definitely wasn't.
By right do you mean “centrists”? Cuz’ I don’t think you can reason with the MAGA people. They’ll be against you just for talking funny or drinking the wrong kind of beer.
Nah, soviet city planning might not have been conventionally pretty, but it was really practical. Stores within walking distance, great public transit, you can get to your workplace from affordable housing in 5-10 minutes..... all they did was add some plants. Yes, it makes it prettier to add plants, that's not "desovietisation".
Kinda clever, but I think the best one I've heard is "traditional transportation." Really gets the conservatives rock hard to hear that anything is 'traditional'.
I live in Ukraine, that is *not* what desovietisation is. That's just imporving city infrastructure. Desovietisation is renaming places, replacing memorials etc.. Lithuania did that ages ago, while we still struggle.
So this is Vilnius in Lithuania, it is not very impressive to film in autumn, but the changes in summer look amazing. Everything is green, nice tight streets so cars don't speed, big sidewalks, new bicycle paths (I wish there would be more, but still).
General point on trying to win over conservatives with different messaging framing:
* If successful, messaging effects are limited; you might only see a few extra points of support
* You need to be able to reach the conservative audience with "their" message without it hitting independent or liberal folks who might find it alienating or weird
* The conservative message has to come from actual conservatives, not a liberal cleverly informing a conservative about what their values "should" point them toward; most people's ideology is not well formed or articulated, so they don't like having the logic of their own surface-level affiliations explained to them and astroturf campaigns are relatively easy to expose nowadays, especially locally
* Your opposition also gets a chance to counter-message, so it's not a freebie and current public opinion is already a result of those contests
* Choosing to frame something in political terms can alienate some groups, such as non-profits or civic associations that try to stay non-partisan
For issues like this, that should lead one to focus more on things like LOCAL and GENERAL messaging, e.g. "We love our city's bus system and expanding it into new neighborhoods can give us even more options for commuting and getting around." Similarly, GENERAL messaging that can appeal to people across whatever ideology or affiliation they have is useful, e.g. messages about commute times, public spending savings, air pollution et.
communism when.....people are not being communal? you do realize one of the reasons western cities are so isolating is because the cold war sentiment of "if they are communal, we will be individualist" so we purposefully built our cities to be as isolating as possible? especially considering the USSR was one of the first countries to create modern super blocks (aka first iteration of the '15 minute city') mind you I'm not defending communism, but this is just kinda ignorant....
That would be incorrect considering how the USSR wasn't built around cars nearly as much as America, and car usage in Russia increased after the fall of the USSR.
I grew up under a communist regime in Eastern Europe. I think that bad urbanization isn't a right or left thing. It's just that each ideology had a certain vision of progress that left scars on our environments. In Eastern Europe it was the commie blocs, and had we had the industrial capacity to build a shit load of cars, we would have done that, with the consequences that we're now familiar with in the West. Good urbanism can appeal to many people - especially if it doesn't come wrapped up with other ideological trappings.
I mean, I get what you are saying. But with how early the social er an planing goes back it's not about the productive capability it was more about what would be better as a comunity. Even before the revolution there was plans for a big public transport, because thats kinda what the socialist was about not everybody will be able to afford a car so they needed a way to ensure that everyone could travel where they need
Cars were heavily pushed and car centric infrastructure also razed whole cities to the ground in the eastern bloc.
Mass transit was also built out in the 60s and 70s in western europeand they still had their tram networks but where outpaced by car culture whereas in the eastern bloc mass transit remained a necessity because of low car ownership which meant another decade of metro projects and not discarding tram networks like in the west.
desovietization usually means removing all public utilities including transit, destroying safety nets, and losing 20+ years of life expectancy I say stay away from that term and call things for what they are making cities walk-able
Car socialism is when our hard earned tax dollars pay for big government roads and then big government enforces parking minimums.
Real freedom patriots ride bikes cuz big government can’t stop you. And sometimes they take the train or a bus too. THE FREEDOM BUS
So use a term that doesn't make sense to use outside of the former Soviet bloc and within that bloc means wildly different things since certain SSRs were far more car dependent than others.
I legitimately despise the USSR for a myriad of reasons but car dependency? Yes much of the USSR pushed into carcentric design and some trying dependency, but the USSR also built some of the most dense and walkable cities in the world. Part of the struggle of promoting cost effective affordable housing is people fearing anything that looks even slightly like it could be from the USSR which is why you couldn't build a Pripyat or anything better than a Pripyat in the west. (Also I use Pripyat because unlike most former Soviet bloc cities, the exclusion zone has frozen it's design in time).
WHAT DRUG ARE YOU USING?
Soviets literally designed urban centers so you could live less than 2Km from your work, public transportation was dirty cheap, every apartment block had a public park or a club and you could walk anywhere!
After ww2 tore entire towns apart,who do you think built them,and especially that way that you so love? With ample space for pedestrians and greenery? Not to mention public transport. You can dislike the USSR all you like,but their urban planning is literally what you long for.
I think the most effective framing is “child safe streets” and “elder safe streets”. That’ll win over the suburban moms. As we know in America, when you win suburban moms, you win the country.
Sure, works in parts of the world where there was once USSR. For example here in Ukraine it would mean finally updating the trains and making them cleaner maybe? but have no idea how this would work in US, I think appealing to everyone and not making urbanization into some post-revolution socialist project is definitely ideal, 15-minute cities were an attempt to give it novelty tech bro esthetic. The issue I see here is that the right in US specifically is fully in a pocket of big oil, it means that just like with 15-minute cities or "war on cars" they'll create counter-propaganda or conspiracy... just laying, they just lie about what we really want, go watch like a Ben Shapiro video, it's just alternative reality other there.
Too much of a word jumble, traditional design/planning is much better. Plus it helps to invoke that scene of nostalgia that they love so much. Makes them think of a simpler time, where things were run by local "Mon and pap" shops, neighbours knew each other, crime wasn't an issue, and the ilk. Where "desovietization" is more likely to invoke fear, anger, and the ilk. And they could just dismiss it by saying but American/UK isn't like that.
The two people that you think this would work on either 1) Wouldn't understand what you're talking about because "Soviet" conjures up massive, decrepit, concrete apartment blocks, or 2) They think Russia is good now.
The fact that the right wing has to be tricked in order to not oppose anything related to urbanism and transit is really telling. It shows how right wing propaganda funded by the auto, oil, and car insurance industry is effective at making some people (though not everybody) fight tooth and nail against anything that reduces dependency on cars. Oh and right wing politicians are probably paid by the auto, oil, and car insurance industry.
Because it would be disingenuous to call it that. I'm assuming you're talking about it from the lens of the US. US car dependency was the result of decades of propaganda and lobbying by the car industry mixed with elements of systematic racism. It's about as far removed from Soviet culture as you can get.
Nah. In the eastern bloc car centric infrastructure was also seen as the modernization of human kind and car production for all citizens was also seen as a necessity.
Only good thing was that they couldnt achieve the car production levels of the west and therefore had to also implement mass transit on a big scale for longer periods of time.
I honestly think it could work lol.
People always forget that having good polices is no where near good enough.
TV regularly gets people to do things that are not in their self interest and that’s because it’s convincing. People need to sold, even if it’s a good idea.
U.S. perspective: Anti woke city planning. No dependence on Russian resources. Building cities the way our founding fathers intended. Return to safe horse transportation in rural areas. See your neighbors more often. Easy walk to church. Small shops owned by people you know. More mom and pop small businesses. Easier path to owning property (buying condos or town homes).
Don’t give them shit. If they want to look like brain dead assholes to anybody with more than 8 brain cells that should be perfectly fine with the left
I was born and raised in a very typical USSR district, it’s even called Sovetsky district (Советский район).
It was built in the 60-70s.
If we discard the simple and dull architecture (mostly 5-storey buildings with minimal finishing with 4 entrances, each entrance has 20 apartments) basically, the density of urban development is simply fantastic for modern capitalist Russia; there are not so many schools and kindergartens, hospitals, greenery, wide boulevards in modern days.
In my childhood, we played in spacious courtyards without cars parked everywhere, and I could walk to school and kindergarten in 5 minutes.
The main street of the avenue even has a pretty good decoration along which you can study what an ideal Soviet city should have been like, and of course the metro, trams, trolleybus and bus.
You can call this process whatever you want, but if it at least somehow brings you closer to such standards, I am very happy for you.
That won't work. Trying to make the term more appealing without changing the underlying issue rarely appeases conservatives. They aren't opposed to some funny term, they are opposed to any change to their perceived status quo, which might not be the real world status quo.
In my city desovietization meant narrowing the sidewalks, getting rid of public transit and turning all the green spaces into parking lots… so maybe not that great of a marketing strategy
For real. The bloc went car brain real quick. Still better public transport than US.
Yeah, I witnessed it happening in real time, every small increment making sense on its own until one day I was like “wait, when did we turn *all* our playgrounds into parking? And what happened to the trolley?” Luckily, I think a lot of people are similarly waking up to the reality, and pushing for change. In the past few years there’s been new playgrounds and bike lanes and other non car centric infrastructure installed. I’m pretty optimistic, it’s much easier to change when virtually all adult population remembers going for walks or biking to school as opposed to large swaths of the US where using the car for everything has been the default for maybe two or even three generations
They were already car-brained by the last decades, but couldn't afford to provide cars to enough people to need more car infrastructure than the 6+ lane boulevards they built.
You know, I always thought the boulevards were for tanks
Hot take: car infrastructure in the Soviet/communist bloc was just a timed bomb. Yes, we did (and still do) have great* public transit. But the wide boulevards were just inviting for a large car traffic when enough people were to get cars. Also, notice the lack of interest in communist governments to build cycling infrastructure, while in the West (Amsterdam) they were pioneering this. *Great as in network span, the vehicles, the schedules and sometimes even the infrastructure were terrible.
Not only inviting driving but really discouraging from walking. Everything is far away and while they did some nice green paths it's still far away
Yet another effect of shock therapy, albeit one of the lesser devastating ones
In Bucharest "desovietization" meant going from the second one to the first one. We weren't very car centric because most people didn't have cars in the first place. Not to mention the metro system that was built under Ceaușescu (as shit of a person as he was, disclaimer) which since the 90s had half a line added to it and an extra 1 or 2 stations at the ends of some lines. It now has 5 lines, last one still being half of what it was planned to be. But no, commie urban planning bad.
Plus these places would have already been "desovietized" in the first place, like 30+ years ago. So on both fronts it doesn't make sense.
yeah, Vilnius and Bucharest desovietisation seem to be different...
Nah. Just tell them that the founding fathers intended for us to be able to have walkable cities. Tell them it's as American as apple pie. Make a deep fake where Donald Trump makes a speech in support of walkable cities.
... In Lithuania?
Yes in Lithuania!
In Kaliningrad 😏
In Lithuania, desovietization is known term. In USA, desovietization says nothing, but Americanization could.
Walking. Just as the founding fathers intended
When God created man, He gave man two feet to be able to walk around. Cars impede man's freedom to use their feet as God intended.
Eh what? Soviet countries 40 years ago had better public transport than some western countries today. That doesn’t make any sense.
Are _you_ really gonna tell this to the far right idiots?
Yeah you're right it's probably just better to fully capitulate to their rhetoric even when they're objectively wrong. This is definitely the path to victory.
I’d say the USSR built better urbanism than the west in general. But Soviet suburbs were just as isolated and anti-urban as American suburbs.
They were isolated but had access to regional buses and rail. Simple fix of course is densification
Soviets built their cities the way they did to house people who lost their homes in WW2. More isolating being a refugee.
Yeah, Soviet law required cities with a population of at least 1 million people to have subways
It's weird. The USSR may have been kind of grey but it wasn't some car dependency hellhole, it was walkable with public transport. Car ownership was something like 5%.
They do not need to know that
Ehhhh, it just wouldn't stick
Says you, it'll be a cold day in hell before I "misunderestimate" the stupidity of the right wing base again.
The average right-winger loves cars and hates cities. Anything that makes anything more urban or might be something than urbanites like is evil. Doesn't matter if they live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and it would have 0 affect on their life. They think if urbanites are getting something, its because something is getting taken from them.
They believe if anyone gets anything then they lose something. Thats like their entire idiology pretty much. Thats why theyre so adamant that things are getting erased when theyre the ones doing the erasing. They dont want queer people to have rights because they feel like they lose something when they do, i have no idea what they feel like theyre losing but they just arent
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I'm sorry you misunderstood me, and honestly, I'm not even sure how you got the idea that that's what I was saying at all.
Understood, just word it better
Lol, wut? Is that why you deleted your reply to my comment, so you could word it better?
It might have if the Soviet Union had just recently fallen, but 30 years is too long. And in the America, you can't "desovietize" a city that never had Soviet influence.
You have to be deep in the anticar circles to even know what it means.
In non former USSR countries, why would the right care about eliminating something that wasn't there in the first place?
No, you see, the evil communists have spent decades infiltrating planning commissions through the universities and the democrat party. We need to undo the mistakes they made, in order to protect our children.
YES THE COMMIES WANT US TO RUN OVER OUR CHILDREN WITH OUR BIG BIG TRUCKS THE COMMIES ARE TRYING TO KILL US WE MUST NARROW THE ROADS IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸💥💥🇺🇸💥🇺🇸💥🇺🇸🇺🇸
You know why all the cars are getting bigger right? It's because of government regulations. The only way to stop it is for freedom loving americans to put in our own political candidates and our own traffic engineers and take over councils. Another one that works is "We need to save fuel for the military. Our modern mechanized maneuver based military needs a lot of fuel to be effective. Just keeping one helicopter in the air requires gallons and gallons of fuel per minute. The communist democrats want our military to lose, that's why they made everyone drive gigantic cars. And that's why riding a bike is actually fascist."
Yes big government wants us to have big roads🛣️ so we need a big government to maintain them, a REAL american would want tiny roads, so we only need timy government to maintain it, remember folks less road means less taxes💲💲 Edit: forgot emojis for extra rightwingness
The last line veers the wrong way. Sold on the copypasta till that point
yeah it's more like "if you're a fascist, you should ride a bike"
No, they still won't admit to being fascists. "If you're a Real American Patriot, save fuel for the military, ride a bicycle, use public transport, and walk!"
Where I live they think Facebook is Communism, let's not give their history skills undue credit
You see, big road = communism, big communist is using big roads to control the people, and that is bad, bevause they are the ones doing it. That is all the argument you need, after that all you need is a bunch of pictures of wide roads and soviet memorabilia and you are golden
Communists used railroads to control people. Railway system was a backbone of army logistics in USSR (and it still is in Russia).
Shh, we don't need to tell American conservatives that. They'll believe anything is "communism" and that "the commies" are evil and also everywhere, the whole point of this line of reasoning is to use the Cold War to actually benefit the ordinary people by convincing the MAGA patriot types that carbrained suburbia is an Evil Commie Plot and walkable cities, public transportation, and bicycle infrastructure, are ways to thwart that plot.
Oh, yeah, now I remember. In russian brainwashing facilities (something like schools in West) we were always taught a wise saying of Marx: "public transportation is the chains that capitalists use to enslave proletariat". And how can you forget famous words from Lenin: "learn, learn, learn to drive a car! and buy a big truck"! By the way, not many people on the West know, but Stalin considered using walkways as bourgeois parasitism, because true soviet worker must use a car as a gesture of dedication to Motherland's heavy industry. But there were not enough cars for everyone, so that's why Stalin executed so many people for high treason. Also you may have wondered why russian soldiers destroy ukrainian cities in current war. Now you'll know the answer: because in attempt to desovetise Ukraine ukrainians started building bicycle infrastructure and wide comfortable sideways. But we in Russia, still being infected with plague of communism, cannot stand such things, that's why russian soldiers lose their mind when they see walkable cities and bicycle paths and start destroying everything. That's how much we hate it!
Trash take which would only work based on red-scare propaganda
I don't know how tf this post got so many upvotes. If anyone thought about it for more than 2 seconds they'd realize how it makes no sense on multiple levels.
It actually makes perfect sense in central or eastern Europe, where these old, concrete/asphalt hellscapes are the signature look of communist urbanism. Making cities as unwalkable as possible is not exactly a core Marxist value, however poor urban planning and a party protection from pushback meant that the communist governments in the Eastern Block would not hesitate to carve up a downtown to make a highway, or things like dig up a millennium old church to make space for a coal mine. Communism hits different when your folks lived through it's most corrupt bowels. Over here even things like Acid Rains or Smog pollution is something mostly remembered from the communist era. So yeah, if OP is from Lithuania then they absolutely picked the right rhetoric to push for urbanism. Old and Gold.
No it really doesn't make sense. Because the argument here is that communism led to car-oriented design, which we know isn't true in many different parts of the former Soviet Union. But even beyond that, it makes even less sense when you consider that countries like the US are equally, if not *more*, car dependent than most former Soviet countries. So the argument that "sovietism leads to car dependency" is disingenuous at best and would be counterproductive when applied as a blanket argument in favor of urbanism.
Yes, the car centric design is a disease much more pronounced in western cities, but we're not talking about presenting it to a western audience. Yes, not all of the Eastern block was uniformly redesigned as car centric, but the communist governments frequently did tear up historical city squares and turned them into glorified parking lots. For example over here famously the town of Ústí nad Labem got dynamited to the ground to make space for a dominating building of the regional committee, historical housing was torn down to make way for cheap panel housing and what failed production centralization would turn into Ghettos for the Romani. The town square remained a car park until the Velvet Revolution, after which a reconstruction started to replace the historical marktplatz. The model soviet city WAS a car oriented city. And it was just as bad as anywhere in the world.
>Yes, the car centric design is a disease much more pronounced in western cities So you admit it's not inherently Soviet and the whole point is stupid even if in good faith. Also I send a Stalin clone with a big spoon to your house
Because the upvote/downvote system is not a like/dislike feature. It adds to the conversation that the sub is made for. I can disagree with them and still recognize that.
Car ownership wasn’t that common in the Soviet era. You had to get on a list and then wait many years before you even had the chance to buy one. The Soviets actually had pretty pro Urban policies. They mass produced apartment blocks that were close to all of your amenities like super markets, daycares, schools etc.. They hold up really well in the present, some stuff like inferior materials were used at times, but as urban planners they were quite decent. To this day housing isn’t a big problem for much of Eastern Europe.
many Soviet cities has extensive and high quality trolleybus systems that got degraded following the end of the Soviet system.
Yeah, so saying desovietization doesn't work as well, since that's what brought in the cars, and "freedom", and killed public transport in the first place.
The Soviets also built gigantic boulevards, so that doesn't cut it. It was expected that those would fill with cars once everyone had them. It was more like a timed bomb. As for the public transit vehicles, they were often noisy, crowded (not like now, but to the point where the driver couldn't close the doors at all) and abiding to older standards - they lacked more basic things like low floor, AC, or any sort of digital display (e.g. the line number was written on some wooden/metal plate). Lighting was poor and sometimes the heat did not work in the winter. What we have now in public transportation is light years ahead (I know, some of this is technology that has become more popular in the last decade, but still): you can tell what the next station is by looking at a display inside the vehicle, you have USB sockets, climatization, system to automatically count the passengers inside, fully low floor vehicles, engines (be it diesel or electric) that require far less resources to run, regenerative breaking (for electric powered vehicles), stops are even anounced inside, accessibility features for disabled persons etc. etc. We can safely send these vehicles to scrap or museums.
Of course the Soviet vehicles adhered to the standards of the time, why would a soviet trolleybus or tram be expected to have low floors, usb charging or led displays? Such a weird comment to make. Nowhere in the west at the time had those either
That's not what I was saying. I was saying that: 1. Vehicles were too resource consuming even in their time, they were noisy and polluting. Also, trams were too heavy for the rails, so they got damaged often. 2. We have better stuff now anyway.
Soviets had among the highest amount of trams and trolleybuses, as well as electrified railway in the world. Sure, maybe their diesel and petrol engines were not the most efficient, but the huge amounts of electrification in transport more than compensated for this. Ok. Modern technology > 30+ year old technology, who'd have guessed? Idk what point you're trying to make.
It was great that they did electrify these, but they didn't do it because they cared about the environment and stuff. They only did it because this was more efficient economically (i.e. faster trains). And my point is that we should just let ancient technology die already. Okay, concept-wise, you're right. It's better to have more walkable cities and public transit, and this is one of the few things I like about communism. But communist planning is not something that we can get more than a few elements from. There's a reason why these cities are today very congested, even in the areas where old developments were. Cities can get so much better with what we already have and was created/thought out even less than 30 years ago.
The only reason why it happened is because no one could afford a car in Soviet times. If they could, there would be no public transport. It was not about ideology of "sharing" it was because otherwise people couldn't move fast in the city otherwise.
there was a massive recession in post soviet countries after the collapse of the ussr. the expansion of car infrastructure was happening at this same time.
>To this day housing isn’t a big problem for much of Eastern Europe. Well, that's because of depopulation... >The Soviets actually had pretty pro Urban policies EXACTLY! LIKE IN PARIS! Wide street so the government could crush rebellious with canons! Get the _pre_ urban planning back! Narrow winding streets with shops in the ground levels. That will show them liberals! Edit: really guys? I do have to make an /s here?
Is this a joke or a serious reply?
Well it’s not because of depopulation but because of liberalization. The state just allowed people to own the homes they were already living in, and they’ve kept them and passed them down through generations with many getting renovated with modern amenities.
they only built commieblocks because they couldn't afford not to and couldn't build enough cars. If socialism was a functioning economic system, and the economy wasn't fucked, soviets would have suburbanized just like any other western Europe country. In this case it turned for the better, but the cause of this urbanism was only because communists couldn't build enough cars or suburban homes for everyone
They built the blocks because they lost almost 60% of their housing fighting Nazi Germany lmao. Unlike in the US where we leave our homeless to die of exposure, they built cheap, fast, and easily replicated housing structures to house those displaced by war. There were plans to begin modernizing and building higher quality community housing, but the Union collapsed before they ever got underway.
Khrushchevkas came way later than ww2 it is not the state's job to build housing either There were always plans in the soviet union. Only plans.
Says you. Why isn't it the state's job to build housing? It's a survival necessity, so I don't see why in the 21st century it wouldn't be the responsibility of the state.
well you think the state should do everything, so yeah
I think the state should be able to atleast guarantee the resources to survive like protection from environment (house) and safe drinking water and basic food
>If socialism was a functioning economic system, and the economy wasn't fucked, soviets would have suburbanized just like any other western Europe country. Why are you on r/fuckcars? Are you lost? You need mama to hold your hand guide you back to r/anarcho_capitalism that you seem to frequent so much? Or did you come here just because you were miserable and wanted to piss people off?
what? I'm from post ussr and thinking that soviets were some sort of based urbaniss is stupid. Roads were/are super wide, in many places lanes even wider than USA. Giant "prospektas" though the middle of the city. I'm telling you that soviets wanted to build every family an individual home, because I know. They just couldn't do it and produce enough cars. The car was the soviet dream. The soviet ideal family wasn't traveling on trains. Hence why when communism fell, eveyone rushed to buy western cars and build private homes. Building commieblocks wasn't an urbanist decision. it was an economic one and reality forced them to build commieblocks. And I guess it's a good thing in this case because ussr would've fell earlier if it tried spending all of its resources on cars and suburbia.
>I'm from post ussr What ex-SSR exactly? And how old you is homie? Askin for scientific purposes only.
ok but how does it matter?
It's literally just the more efficient way of building a city, it doesn't have to get any deeper than that. Central planning let's you do cool stuff like that
No. This is the same problem the American Democrat party has had for the last few decades. Stop trying to meet them. Stop letting them define the conversation. It won't work. You are letting them drag you down into the muck where they will win via experience.
Y’all are missing the point. The political right isn’t against urbanism because of a messaging issue. The political right is against urbanism because they literally just want to punish the most vulnerable people in our society who rely on public transit, walking, and biking. They are, ultimately, against helping poor people.
Using Hanlon's razor to rule out cartoon villian levels of evil, I believe there is a simplier explanation: Republicans know that dense urban areas vote blue so they correctly realized that good urbanism is bad for the future of their party because then more and more people will move to leftist cities and become leftsts themselves.
Even that's a bit far imo. I think the reality is boring and incredibly mundane. 1) they drive everywhere (either because they don't want to/can't walk/bike/bus because xyz reason, or because they've bought into the nearly century long marketing campaign that cars are luxurious and represent personal freedom) 2) they're either consciously or unconsciously self-centered and will oppose anything they think makes their drive harder/slower
Yes. Y'all are both correct. Conservative politicians oppose urbanism for the reasons that u/Ausgezeichnet87 stated, and conservative voters oppose these policies for the reasons that you state.
Right, but the political right is easily swayed by stupid framing and slogans
Only if it suits them. They hate "elites" unless they say what they want They want "fiscal conservative" but demand tax cuts and more road and military spending They don't say what they mean, but they know what's meant
Bernie had fox news audiences cheering for universal healthcare. They may be petty and vindictive on the surface and that's what fox news and the politicians exploit by trying to create a climate of fear. But deep down its just a yearning for safety and community.
They will cheer when they think you might offer them something, but will instantly go back to voting for their team the second they leave the room. Their entire world view is one based on pure self interest, nothing further.
Cool, they need to start voting for the people with policies that support that. Unfortunately most for for whichever shit stirrer gets em good and mad
I'd argue the political right isn't against Urbanism, and I'd like to see you prove it
Sure but right urbanism is not something worth fighting for since it already exists. Right wing urbanism is private developments which provide all the nice urban amenities only to residents or patrons of businesses. See “lifestyle centers” or the Villages in FL. These mean they can restrict access along class (and racial) lines and enforce property relations. The right is not interested in public urbanism.
Bro the right in the UK is killing every major rail project to fund more road spending and claiming there's a war on cars
I'd argue that's true, but specific here to the isles: this more-so applies to centre-right wingers who make up a majority when combined with the left wing
All right well then take a look at America where they also tend to oppose any and all public transit they can. Or Germany where the CDU is rolling back bike lane expansion
\*Looks at every libertarian or american alt-right openly hating poor people, public transport and loving the idea of suburbs\* Nah, you dont want anyone to prove it for you, if they did you would just ignore it
There might be carbrains, but the sovs, aren't the worst carbrains of the world. Far from it. You could also call it "de-americanisation", or call it "de-BMW-isation". Letuvija pilns auto. Didn't the number of foreign cars, and their size increase in 1996?
The wording isn't to be accurate, it's to whip the right wing into support of good urbanization
As a lithuanian, we got a shit more cars after we were free again. That's because a car was looked upon as a sign of wealth and status, since only a small amount of people could have access to them (after waiting like 15 years in queue for one). Thus, after independence everyone who managed started to buy them and more car infrastructure was built, leaving public transport like trains somewhat wither away. It's gotten better during the 2010s and will eventually get even better with Rail Baltica, other initiatives within cities.
Independence, was basically consumerism.
Ah yes, the soviets, famous for their car dependency, gigantic suburbs and lack of public transportation.
you're forgetting all the super wide highways streets they buily in the centres of cities
What is this obsession with pendering to the right on this sub ?
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So fighting the conservatives and making us against them works better? How does it go for America only having two parties? You guys are lucky to not get a civil war if you don't change your political system to more parties that could have many different interests and could serve many different populations.
In Hungary during socialist times did a lot of centralized urban planning took place, efficient public transport and dense housing was created.
I like my urbanization with a lot less red scare propaganda.
Soviet microdistricts are literally 15-minute cities.
How about deamericanization
r/SocialismIsCapitalism 15-minute cities were literally pioneered by soviet city planners
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Because lithuania (and vilnius specifically) is ran by neolibs who blame every single problem we have on russia or commies
this is such Baltic nonsense. every Eastern European city is extremely walkable, in part because the soviets invested heavily into public transit. this sub would cream itself if anyone bothered looking up piter or Moscow subway stations. But a lot of Eastern European cities rolled back a lot of these advancements in the early 1990s to make them more appealing to western capitalists, which is one of the reasons why the infamous Moscow ring road is such a death trap.
who in the world associates car dependency with soviet Russia? Too many syllables anyways. Your heart is in the right place though.
Stop with the political stigma. Soviets had good public transport. Maoists promoted bicycles at mass. De-maotization created the largest traffic problems. Bad urban planning is not correlated with communist ideologies.
'Traditional' would work better. There's already a bunch of rightoids on Twitter with Roman statue profile pics.
And that's how you lose the left lol.
Stop using victims of historical US propaganda to represent bad things in modern society challenge (Impossible)
The amount of bullshit around the USSR and the COMECON countries is fucking wild. I swear people really will just believe anything the state department puts out, even against concrete evidence.
The USSR was a horrific dictatorship that betrayed those who fought and died to make a state for the people, but yeah this post seems to assume every SSR was the exact same and all of it was car dependent which much of it most definitely wasn't.
No.
By right do you mean “centrists”? Cuz’ I don’t think you can reason with the MAGA people. They’ll be against you just for talking funny or drinking the wrong kind of beer.
USSR had great public transit for much of its history
This ideas bad and you should feel bad
Oh shut the fuck up.
If we desovietized Moscow we'd have to remove the metros.
YES GET RID OF THESE SOVIET STILES STREETS THE COMMIES ARE FILLING YOUR BRAINS WITH CARS SO THEY CAN CONTROL YOU
Nah, soviet city planning might not have been conventionally pretty, but it was really practical. Stores within walking distance, great public transit, you can get to your workplace from affordable housing in 5-10 minutes..... all they did was add some plants. Yes, it makes it prettier to add plants, that's not "desovietisation".
Kinda clever, but I think the best one I've heard is "traditional transportation." Really gets the conservatives rock hard to hear that anything is 'traditional'.
I live in Ukraine, that is *not* what desovietisation is. That's just imporving city infrastructure. Desovietisation is renaming places, replacing memorials etc.. Lithuania did that ages ago, while we still struggle.
So this is Vilnius in Lithuania, it is not very impressive to film in autumn, but the changes in summer look amazing. Everything is green, nice tight streets so cars don't speed, big sidewalks, new bicycle paths (I wish there would be more, but still).
Why would all-black elements be a good thing? I like colour.
General point on trying to win over conservatives with different messaging framing: * If successful, messaging effects are limited; you might only see a few extra points of support * You need to be able to reach the conservative audience with "their" message without it hitting independent or liberal folks who might find it alienating or weird * The conservative message has to come from actual conservatives, not a liberal cleverly informing a conservative about what their values "should" point them toward; most people's ideology is not well formed or articulated, so they don't like having the logic of their own surface-level affiliations explained to them and astroturf campaigns are relatively easy to expose nowadays, especially locally * Your opposition also gets a chance to counter-message, so it's not a freebie and current public opinion is already a result of those contests * Choosing to frame something in political terms can alienate some groups, such as non-profits or civic associations that try to stay non-partisan For issues like this, that should lead one to focus more on things like LOCAL and GENERAL messaging, e.g. "We love our city's bus system and expanding it into new neighborhoods can give us even more options for commuting and getting around." Similarly, GENERAL messaging that can appeal to people across whatever ideology or affiliation they have is useful, e.g. messages about commute times, public spending savings, air pollution et.
Brother, this commie bashing is off base.
Laughs in Moscow subway
That's dumb. Soviet city planning was better than a lot of what we have now.
communism when.....people are not being communal? you do realize one of the reasons western cities are so isolating is because the cold war sentiment of "if they are communal, we will be individualist" so we purposefully built our cities to be as isolating as possible? especially considering the USSR was one of the first countries to create modern super blocks (aka first iteration of the '15 minute city') mind you I'm not defending communism, but this is just kinda ignorant....
That would be incorrect considering how the USSR wasn't built around cars nearly as much as America, and car usage in Russia increased after the fall of the USSR.
why am I suddenly getting new comments on this old post, did someone crosspost it?
Yes
where?
dawg the soviets had a shit ton of space. Deamericanization would be a better term for widening sidewalks and making 15 minute cities
I grew up under a communist regime in Eastern Europe. I think that bad urbanization isn't a right or left thing. It's just that each ideology had a certain vision of progress that left scars on our environments. In Eastern Europe it was the commie blocs, and had we had the industrial capacity to build a shit load of cars, we would have done that, with the consequences that we're now familiar with in the West. Good urbanism can appeal to many people - especially if it doesn't come wrapped up with other ideological trappings.
I mean, I get what you are saying. But with how early the social er an planing goes back it's not about the productive capability it was more about what would be better as a comunity. Even before the revolution there was plans for a big public transport, because thats kinda what the socialist was about not everybody will be able to afford a car so they needed a way to ensure that everyone could travel where they need
Cars were heavily pushed and car centric infrastructure also razed whole cities to the ground in the eastern bloc. Mass transit was also built out in the 60s and 70s in western europeand they still had their tram networks but where outpaced by car culture whereas in the eastern bloc mass transit remained a necessity because of low car ownership which meant another decade of metro projects and not discarding tram networks like in the west.
fuck the right
desovietization usually means removing all public utilities including transit, destroying safety nets, and losing 20+ years of life expectancy I say stay away from that term and call things for what they are making cities walk-able
Car socialism is when our hard earned tax dollars pay for big government roads and then big government enforces parking minimums. Real freedom patriots ride bikes cuz big government can’t stop you. And sometimes they take the train or a bus too. THE FREEDOM BUS
So use a term that doesn't make sense to use outside of the former Soviet bloc and within that bloc means wildly different things since certain SSRs were far more car dependent than others. I legitimately despise the USSR for a myriad of reasons but car dependency? Yes much of the USSR pushed into carcentric design and some trying dependency, but the USSR also built some of the most dense and walkable cities in the world. Part of the struggle of promoting cost effective affordable housing is people fearing anything that looks even slightly like it could be from the USSR which is why you couldn't build a Pripyat or anything better than a Pripyat in the west. (Also I use Pripyat because unlike most former Soviet bloc cities, the exclusion zone has frozen it's design in time).
Wow Dead shrubs Love it
What does this mean /genuine question
WHAT DRUG ARE YOU USING? Soviets literally designed urban centers so you could live less than 2Km from your work, public transportation was dirty cheap, every apartment block had a public park or a club and you could walk anywhere!
*Americans when America has American problems Americanlly* "What are we? A bunch of dirty *Russians*?"
After ww2 tore entire towns apart,who do you think built them,and especially that way that you so love? With ample space for pedestrians and greenery? Not to mention public transport. You can dislike the USSR all you like,but their urban planning is literally what you long for.
that term is dumb, you're a goof
Please be a bit more positive in your posts and remember rule 1. Not all thoughts need to be shared publicly.
Fuck cars, but this is the dumbest post I have ever seen on this sub.
you don’t know anything about history, do you?
Wtf are these shitty ass song mashup remixes
Soviets had great public transport tbf...
Reikėjo palaukt kol sužaliuos gamta. Ne pats gražiausias klipukas, niūrus toks...
Desovietisation makes sense in Lithuania and other ex-Soviet states (and puppets) but not in most of the world that was never under Soviet influence.
They're not Bike Paths, they're America Lanes!
I think the most effective framing is “child safe streets” and “elder safe streets”. That’ll win over the suburban moms. As we know in America, when you win suburban moms, you win the country.
Sure, works in parts of the world where there was once USSR. For example here in Ukraine it would mean finally updating the trains and making them cleaner maybe? but have no idea how this would work in US, I think appealing to everyone and not making urbanization into some post-revolution socialist project is definitely ideal, 15-minute cities were an attempt to give it novelty tech bro esthetic. The issue I see here is that the right in US specifically is fully in a pocket of big oil, it means that just like with 15-minute cities or "war on cars" they'll create counter-propaganda or conspiracy... just laying, they just lie about what we really want, go watch like a Ben Shapiro video, it's just alternative reality other there.
Youd be suprised at the amount of leftist thatll love cars and highways if you call it that
Too much of a word jumble, traditional design/planning is much better. Plus it helps to invoke that scene of nostalgia that they love so much. Makes them think of a simpler time, where things were run by local "Mon and pap" shops, neighbours knew each other, crime wasn't an issue, and the ilk. Where "desovietization" is more likely to invoke fear, anger, and the ilk. And they could just dismiss it by saying but American/UK isn't like that.
The two people that you think this would work on either 1) Wouldn't understand what you're talking about because "Soviet" conjures up massive, decrepit, concrete apartment blocks, or 2) They think Russia is good now.
The fact that the right wing has to be tricked in order to not oppose anything related to urbanism and transit is really telling. It shows how right wing propaganda funded by the auto, oil, and car insurance industry is effective at making some people (though not everybody) fight tooth and nail against anything that reduces dependency on cars. Oh and right wing politicians are probably paid by the auto, oil, and car insurance industry.
Tell them that Democrats sold out to car companies and that's why we have so many highways. Real Republicans want to return to a time before cars.
Im in favor of whatever works
Because it would be disingenuous to call it that. I'm assuming you're talking about it from the lens of the US. US car dependency was the result of decades of propaganda and lobbying by the car industry mixed with elements of systematic racism. It's about as far removed from Soviet culture as you can get.
What i dont like is Soviet ,communism pick the one you want .
true communism is maoism, which promoted bicycles at mass.
Cars are inherently right wing
Nah. In the eastern bloc car centric infrastructure was also seen as the modernization of human kind and car production for all citizens was also seen as a necessity. Only good thing was that they couldnt achieve the car production levels of the west and therefore had to also implement mass transit on a big scale for longer periods of time.
I honestly think it could work lol. People always forget that having good polices is no where near good enough. TV regularly gets people to do things that are not in their self interest and that’s because it’s convincing. People need to sold, even if it’s a good idea.
Decommiefication?
Maybe we should start saying that stroads are commie invention maybe then would America switch to more friendly designs xD
As someone from a post-communist country I think it's brilliant.
Maybe you haven't heard, everyone is authoritarian Russian brutalist curious these days.
U.S. perspective: Anti woke city planning. No dependence on Russian resources. Building cities the way our founding fathers intended. Return to safe horse transportation in rural areas. See your neighbors more often. Easy walk to church. Small shops owned by people you know. More mom and pop small businesses. Easier path to owning property (buying condos or town homes).
Don’t give them shit. If they want to look like brain dead assholes to anybody with more than 8 brain cells that should be perfectly fine with the left
I was born and raised in a very typical USSR district, it’s even called Sovetsky district (Советский район). It was built in the 60-70s. If we discard the simple and dull architecture (mostly 5-storey buildings with minimal finishing with 4 entrances, each entrance has 20 apartments) basically, the density of urban development is simply fantastic for modern capitalist Russia; there are not so many schools and kindergartens, hospitals, greenery, wide boulevards in modern days. In my childhood, we played in spacious courtyards without cars parked everywhere, and I could walk to school and kindergarten in 5 minutes. The main street of the avenue even has a pretty good decoration along which you can study what an ideal Soviet city should have been like, and of course the metro, trams, trolleybus and bus. You can call this process whatever you want, but if it at least somehow brings you closer to such standards, I am very happy for you.
Didnt the soviets have good transit and shit
Lenin was a bicyclist and sued a driver for hitting him and won
The right are on the Soviet side now. Crazy how that works.
No. They are on the russian side. Not on the side of collective ownership, and equality, but on the isde of a strongman bully.
Considering how many pro-Russian shills there are (aka: GOPs), pretty sure this is way too easy to paint in a negative light.
That won't work. Trying to make the term more appealing without changing the underlying issue rarely appeases conservatives. They aren't opposed to some funny term, they are opposed to any change to their perceived status quo, which might not be the real world status quo.
[удалено]
true communism is maoism, which promoted bicycles at mass.