Socialist City of 1935–1985

During the rapid industrialisation of the 1920s–1930s, the Soviet Union developed the concept of socialist cities — enclosed, self-contained settlements established alongside new industrial sites, with a fixed population. Nearly the entire architectural community of the country was involved in designing these cities, along with state and public figures, scholars, hygiene specialists and left-wing architects from abroad.

Designers were tasked with shaping a new collectivist individual, creating a new socialist way of life, and efficiently supplying labour for the growing industrial sector.

More than 50 socialist cities were built during the Soviet era, although the concept was never fully realised in any of them. The most well-known examples include the socialist cities of Magnitogorsk and Novokuznetsk, Greater Stalingrad — comprising five socialist cities located along the Volga River — and Avtostroy in Nizhny Novgorod, the only Soviet socialist city to have survived in its entirety to this day.

 In the 1960s, another urban planning concept emerged — the "New Element of Settlement" (NER), developed in 1962 by a group of students from the Moscow Institute of Architecture led by Alexei Gutnov and Ilya Lezhava. The NER was conceived as a response to the intense urbanisation of that period. The idea was to "stitch" the entire free territory of the USSR, from Kaliningrad to the Far East, with a triangulated network of transport corridors — the settlement channels — with evenly distributed communities (NERs) placed along them. The channels would contain industry, education, science and culture, while the NERs would be spaces for private life. Each NER was designed to house no more than 100,000 people. In 1968, the project was exhibited at the Milan Triennale, alongside works by Arata Isozaki and the Archigram group. The NER project merged urban design with bioplastic forms, geometric structures and kinetic urban planning. Continuing the ideas of linear cities proposed in the 1920s by Ivan Leonidov and Nikolai Milyutin, it advocated for the separation of work and living spaces, the rejection of uncontrolled urban sprawl, and the humanisation of the urban environment. These ideas remain relevant in contemporary architecture.