October 31, 2025

Plattetopia

Neu Hohenschönhausen 2019 Familiar as I am with the paradoxes of life in modern industrial housing, that the more humans are packed into concrete compartments the more atomised they become, such spaces are conceived through ideas about modern utopias and socialist dreams. Irrespective of whether it’s the banlieues of Paris, or the Stalinist mega-estates of the former Soviet bloc, cast in each and every cubic millimetre of concrete is a strain of utopia. Nowhere was it as bold or as advanced as in the vast estates of the former East German republic. In the old GDR, over a third of […]