Rhetoric of Anti-Rhetoric: Egalitarianism as a Formal Feature of (Post-) Soviet Cities

After WWII housing became a mass problem, and would have been increasingly faced in terms of industrial and logistic productivity; in the frantic process of improvement of standardisation, production itself would gain ground as an aesthetic category; the face of the soviet city would take on those precise and extensively recurring uniformity traits that will become the symbol itself of the city. In particular, with the decree of the Central Committee and Council Minister “On the removal of excesses in design and a construction”, sanctioning the ideological elimination of the “decaying” criteria of ornamentations dating back to the Stalin period, Khrushev formally banished both the formalism and the model itself of the typical Stalinist city, and focuses on productive optimisation, by implementing a thorough functionalist approach from the building and town planning viewpoint. The issue of housing is tackled from a merely numerical perspective; accommodations are coded according to minimum size alternatives and to a zeroed aggregative range. Once ratified on the basis of the new approach implemented by Brezhnev in the mid-1960s, the figure of micro-rayon became the main feature of soviet cities; the poverty of aggregative variants, both at a building and town-planning level, excludes any variation of urban design and the characteristics of places never represent an element of concern for designers. The utopia of regulated, bright and open city, shared by several avant-gardes, find here its strictest implementation; in this case, however, openness mainly translates into dispersion, disorientation; the egalitarian utopia does not deal with the need for places or, better, well knows that a place is, after all, identity, and identity is individualism. Post-Soviet cities inherit this crystallised urban tradition and, with different premises, the problem of mass housing reappears, even if this has become a mass of potential consumers, with space and personalisation needs that decades of standardisation had rejected.