Season 4 - Footnote: Housing [Житло]

Every so often we’re going to bring you something we’ve been calling off-cuts and footnotes. These are extended scenes and deep dives that didn’t make the final cut of the main episodes. This is also a place where we can talk about your questions and comments. So feel free to send your thoughts to htbdpodcast@gmail.com in a voice note or a quick message.

This episode is a footnote. We’re going to take a deeper dive into housing in the context of the Soviet Union. In the USSR and generally in the post-World War II city planning regimes, housing and new construction technologies played a major role in urban development booms. We’re still feeling the impact of it to this day. The Soviet Union is a major contributor to this moment because it planned standardized residential developments to be deployed around its territories and spheres of influence. These designs were replicated so extensively that you can find them all over the world, from Poland to Iran from Estonia to Vietnam and of course in Odes[s]a.

In this footnote, we’ll hear from Kate Malaia, the author of Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room, about the development of these residential blocks. We’ll also hear from Odesiti who lived in the Soviet Union’s first housing experiment, the communalki or communal apartments and later transitioned to different types of residential housing in Soviet Odes[s]a.