Socio-Economic Factors in the Development of Residential Micro-Districts in Europe and North America: 1950s - 1970s

The article, based on previous research, presents a summary comparative analysis of factors and factors that directly influenced the formation and development of compact micro-district housing in the USSR, Eastern and Western Europe and North America in the postwar period. The emphasis is on comparing the initial factors and subsequent operation, "success" or "failure" of the relevant projects in terms of the experience of the coming decades, which is extrapolated to the current construction situation. The urgent need for the rapid resettlement of large numbers of new urban populations, induced by the rapid urbanization of the mid-twentieth century, in Europe and the USSR was greatly exacerbated by the great destruction of housing during World War II. In the Soviet Union, this housing crisis had a corresponding negative background since the early 1920s, which only increased over time. These factors, combined with the rapid development of the engineering and construction industry and the background of post-war technological progress, led to the appeal of both architectural and power elites to functionalism and modernism in residential development and the crystallization of the idea of mass construction of affordable multi-storey housing with social infrastructure, grouped into micro-districts. However, the difference in economic conditions between the market and planned economy, on the one hand, and historically formed social factors in Europe and North America, on the other, led to different results with similar construction techniques in style and conditions in the 1950s - 1960s (which received the common name "international style").