Smart Growth And The Ideal Communist City

"American suburbs are 'a chaotic and depressing agglomeration of buildings covering enormous stretches of land.' The cost of providing services to such 'monotonous stretches of individual low-rise houses' is too high. As a result, 'the search for a future kind of residential building leads logically to' high-density, mixed-use housing.

This sounds like typical writings of New Urbanist or smart-growth planners. In fact, these words were written nearly forty years ago by University of Moscow planners in a book titled The Ideal Communist City. The principles in their book formed a blueprint for residential construction all across Russia and eastern Europe. With a couple of minor changes, they could also be the blueprint for smart growth.

...Like the New Urbanists, the soviet planners saw several advantages to such high-density housing."