The Ideal Communist City

This book was initiated by the architecture-faculty of the University of Moscow in the late fifties. For the Italian edition in 1968 the material was enlarged and revised by the authors, a group of young urbanists, architects, and sociologists, who represent a renewal of ideas and men that is taking place in Soviet Russia, especially in fields concerned with the organization of the physical environment. Their work is particularly original in its general assumptions, method of inquiry, and choice of models. The authors turn away from the proposition that the city should attempt to restore the habits and appearance of the countryside. This proposition adapted from the bourgeois naturalism of the nineteenth century, contradicted the ideological foundations of communism. By contrast, what is proposed in this book is world-wide urbanization. The authors design concept, the New Unit of Settlement, incorporates countryside with city, conceiving both as a communication network, uniformly intense and diffused.