[kingofhdds]

The starting comment in the thread explicitly mentions "Soviet". I cannot say much about GDR, but as for USSR, Mantas is right. Soviets controlled 100% of employment options, and restricted movements of citizens - and that was their approach to urban planning. Which in the end didn't work well anyway, as my parents waited for an apartment for more then 20 years, and finally USSR collapsed before it happened :-) By the way, I guess GDR was not that different in the idea, it's just that lesser territory, and population made the approach less catastrophic.

[freeflight]

Imho the GDR was just another extension of the Soviet Union, sovereign in theory only. Otherwise the "Iron Curtain" wouldn't have gone up where it did, splitting Germany in half.

Of course, the GDR also saw its fair share of cronyism with all of its injustices, like they exist everywhere, but the Plattenbauten are still held in high regard by many East-Germans.

Maybe the Soviet approach wasn't actually that catastrophic it just didn't scale that well when applied to the more populated and bigger eastern bloc states compared to the GDR? GDR wasn't that big, so not that much need to force people to move around.

[mantas]

To give you some idea, GDR was seen as almost totally west from USSR. Anything "made in GDR" was immediately seen as super high quality. Getting visa to visit GDR was next-to-west hard.

USSR had much worse conditions as a starting point. On top of that, it was an empire that had assimilation as one of it's goals as well as military targets to meet. Thus playing field for citizens was far from level. For example, even whole "strategic" cities were much nicer to live in that a regular cities. Better food, more exotic food options, better housing, more entertainment... You name it.

The whole approach of state-owned housing is not catastrophic. If you can build reasonably fast. USSR couldn't. After all, catastrophic productivity is what brought the red empire to it's knees. Why it was so bad is another topic though.