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In Socialist Yugoslavia, Mass Housing Wasn’t Just Ugly Tower Blocks

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A thousand online galleries associate prefab housing with the gray conformity of Soviet tower blocks. But in socialist Yugoslavia, architects built affordable public housing that offered comfortable homes for all. Vinogradski Venac Street, Cerak Vinogradi Housing Estate, Belgrade, Serbia, around 1987. From the personal archive of Milenija and Darko Marušić. Kissinger is dead. Jacobin is alive. Subscribe today in print for $10. The popular legacy of state-socialist mass housing built in the twentieth century occupies a register somewhere between stereotype, parody, and fetish. The standard tropes will likely be familiar to nearly any reader with access to a Wi-Fi signal. Generic panelized blocks in varying states of decrepitude are premium currency on social media, where a profusion of stylized photos depicting bleak social housing estates rendered in concrete fuels the usual misconceptions. It is said that the regimes responsible for building prefabricated mass housing wholly failed to

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