Between the Blocks

Roman Mars: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. Reporter Andrew Anderson is from the UK, but today he lives in Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. Andrew moved to Bulgaria because that’s where his wife, Victoria, grew up. 

Andrew Anderson: I came for a summer to try it out, and I just fell in love with it. 

Roman Mars: The city was charmingly chaotic, with a thriving art scene. They stayed through one summer, then a second. And after two years in Sofia, Andrew and Victoria put down roots. They decided to save money by moving out of their centrally located rental and into a little apartment owned by Victoria’s family. 

Andrew Anderson: I was kind of a bit worried about it because Vicky had told me that it’s really small and really crappy and really dingy and I shouldn’t have any expectations that I’m going to enjoy it and maybe we won’t even move there because maybe it’s going to be too much for me, and I won’t be able to cope with it. 

Roman Mars: The apartment was in an old communist built neighborhood called Slavia, in an area called Krasno Selo. 

Andrew Anderson: Which literally translates as “beautiful village.” I can confirm it is not a beautiful village anymore. Now it’s kind of maybe what you would have in mind if you were thinking of stereotypical Eastern Europe–lots of tower blocks, lots of kiosks, and things like that around

Roman Mars: The first time Andrew went to see the apartment, he had trouble even finding it. To get there, he had to walk through a maze of overgrown paths and unmarked buildings. When he finally managed to find the right building, he still had to climb seven flights of stairs. But inside his new apartment, it was all worth it. 

Andrew Anderson: When I got to the apartment and looked out the window, I was like, “What a beautiful view.” And once you’re looking down on the neighborhood, suddenly it looks totally different because from the ground level, it’s very disorganized, cluttered, messy. But once you get up here, all you can really see is trees with little apartment blocks poking up between them. So, it’s a totally different perspective. 

Roman Mars: Seen from above, Sofia looks less like a city and more like a forest. And what at first looked to Andrew like a mess of winding footpaths and untamed greenery turned out to be one of Sofia’s most iconic features. 

Andrew Anderson: There’s a few different things that people call them. The main term is, like, “mezhdu blokovete,” which just means literally “between the blocks.”

Roman Mars: These green spaces between apartment buildings and Sofia are also known as interblock parks. 

Andrew Anderson: There’s hundreds of them. They’re not even fully documented, so you don’t really know how many there are. 

Roman Mars: The spaces aren’t really parks in the Western sense. They’re usually not fenced in. And since they all flow together, it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. The general effect is a series of walkable rivers of greenspace running through the city. 

Andrew Anderson: I could walk through old communist blocks without ever going on a road just through these parks because there’s a footpath. And then you get to a small park, and then a footpath, maybe a bigger park, maybe just a really little one with only one swing, maybe one that’s bigger and has, like, ten pieces of furniture in it–you know–with everyone with their clothes, like, strung all the way across the thing, so it looks like an early Scorsese film or something like that. 

Roman Mars: The park closest to Andrew’s house is pretty typical of the form–if a bit more on the rustic side. 

Andrew Anderson: It’s not very big–I would guess half a football field in this case. There’s a big globe climbing frame. There’s these benches. There’s some ping pong tables. There’s two ping-pong tables, both of which don’t have nets anymore. But they’re perfect for, like, improvised picnic tables, so people just put their beers on them. 

Roman Mars: Soon after, Andrew and his family moved into the little apartment in Slavia, they found themselves using the interblock park as a combination playground, event space, and social club. 

Andrew Anderson: You end up making friends quite quickly. I lived in Manchester for eight years and I didn’t know a single one of my neighbors. And I know quite a lot of the people in this block and even more in the surrounding neighborhood. 

Roman Mars: Andrew is the only foreigner in his apartment block. He started going to the park every day, meeting neighbors who had grown up in Sofia and who saw the parks mostly as just another part of their daily landscape. Then Andrew met someone else as fascinated by the interblock parks as he was. 

Ashira Morris: My name is Ashira Morris, and I am a freelance reporter based between Sofia and Florida. 

Roman Mars: Andrew and Ashira are both foreigners married to Bulgarians. And they shared a certain outsider’s awe about the parks. 

Ashira Morris: I think for both of us, these are spaces that–especially as people coming in from the U.S. and the UK–they just feel really special. And I feel like it’s one of my favorite things from the city in a way. 

Roman Mars: Sofia’s interblock parks were both unexpected and charming, especially coming from the tidy streets of Manchester or the suburban sprawl of northern Florida. So, they both took notice after a rumor started spreading through Andrew’s neighborhood that his local park might be bulldozed. 

Andrew Anderson: At the time, when I first heard about it, I was like, “Well, how’s that possible?” There’s not even really much space between these parks. Like I said, it’s like two tennis courts. And also, I was working under the assumption that this was public park space. So why would you build on it? 

Roman Mars: Soon a planning notice showed up. The city had given permission to a developer to put up two new apartment buildings. They would go up next to the interblock park. But the developers needed an access road into the building’s parking garage. They planned to build it exactly where the picnic tables are now. 

Andrew Anderson: I was shocked because in England, it would be much harder to do that because there tends to be such rigid planning laws. And I have to say, I grew up living inside a national park in a place called Bakewell that’s in the Peak District National Park. So, getting stuff planned, like any planning permission there–even to, like, put a garden gnome in your garden–can be quite tricky sometimes. 

Roman Mars: Andrew and Ashira started talking to experts, trying to understand how an iconic part of Sofia’s urban landscape could so easily disappear. What they quickly discovered is that since the fall of Bulgarian communism in the late 1980s, Sofia has lost more than half of its green space. To understand how it happened and what the fate of the remaining parks might be, they had to go back to the origin of the capital city itself. 

Ashira Morris: Sofia is a really young capital. So, you have a place that has been a city but not a big city. 

Roman Mars: Before it became a city of parks and apartments, Sofia was a sleepy place. It was bombed during World War II but not as badly as other European capitals partly because there just wasn’t as much of a city to bomb. 

Ashira Morris: Bulgaria as a country overall, until communism, was very agrarian. It was not very industrial. There was not a proletariat that was working in the factories and organizing and rising up. It was mostly farmers. 

Roman Mars: The Bulgarian Communist Party came to power in 1946, when the city was home to just 400,000 people and was surrounded by farmland. The goal of Bulgaria’s new communist government was to transform Sofia into a modern industrial capital. 

Ashira Morris: And they’re looking to this farmland, and they’re seeing this as kind of a blank slate. 

Roman Mars: As Bulgarian city planners were dreaming up a new Sofia. They knew what they were not interested in: suburbs. Bulgarian urban planning textbooks called the kind of single-family homes popping up in America at the time, quote, “bourgeois fascist.” Instead, they opted for French modernism via the Soviet Union. 

Ashira Morris: Bulgaria was never a part of the USSR. It had its own communist dictator and its own self-governance but was also very loyal and very much in step with what the USSR was doing on a lot of different fronts. And that includes what they’re city planning. 

Roman Mars: Here’s architectural historian and critic Aneta Vasileva. 

Aneta Vasileva: There is one architectural historian and theorist who is saying that if you have to describe the postwar period in three words, these worlds would have been “ruins,” Stalin, and “Le Corbusier.”

Roman Mars: “Stalin,” “ruins,” and “Le Corbusier” also happen to be in every story pitch meeting we have at 99PI. Anyway, the work of Swiss French architect Le Corbusier inspired the USSR to move toward open geometry in its urban planning. 

Aneta Vasileva: This kind of architecture for the people–architecture for society–a model way of developing cities of freestanding structures within vast green areas and separate functions of housing, living, recreation, and work to rebuild the devastations of war. 

Ashira Morris: Le Corbusier himself, I believe, has a correspondence with some of the main city planners in Moscow. And there is an anecdote that, like, all of the city planners in Sofia had a portrait of Le Corbusier in their offices in the way that you would have the Lenin portrait. 

Roman Mars: But alongside Le Corbusier’s clean, sharp modernism, Soviet urban planners were also drawn to the British garden city movement. The idea was that urban planners could bring the country into the city, incorporating pockets of nature to counterbalance noise and pollution. Soviet city planners embraced the garden city and made it their own. 

Ashira Morris: They talk about, like, having corridors of green air move through the city. And I find it really beautiful–just the way that people talk about these environmental elements as being kind of embodied. 

Roman Mars: The dream of a fully actualized garden city quickly spread across the Eastern Bloc. The model seemed perfectly suited to communist ideals. 

Sonia Hirt: And it was very important then to have massive public spaces, because the regime was supposed to elevate the public realm. And what better way to elevate the public realm but by having really magnificent public spaces, including parks? 

Roman Mars: Sonia Hirt is a professor of landscape architecture who first experienced landscape and architecture growing up in Sofia. She says that communist countries were far from the only places looking to put these ideals into action. 

Sonia Hirt: So, I think it’s easy to assume that, you know, communism and capitalism were different in terms of urban design, but I actually don’t think they were. In terms of the design features and the design ideology of the parks, I don’t think that’s any different. It’s simply that they were more important to the socialist regime than they were in capitalist countries–and also, they have a greater opportunity. 

Roman Mars: Capitalists and communists might have had similar tastes in city planning, but they had very different approaches to implement that planning. Starting in 1948, the Bulgarian government nationalized all private property. That meant that if you owned any land in or around Sofia, it became the property of the state. The most you might get in return was an apartment or two in a block near your former home. 

Andrew Anderson: I think it’s just very utilitarian, isn’t it? Like, the minimum thing you need to live is an apartment, so you get an apartment. But the farmer who’s living in the farmhouse–he’ll get an apartment in exchange for his farmhouse but not for the land because that’s now going to become a factory. That’s now going to become more apartment blocks. That’s now going to become a collectivized farm. 

Roman Mars: Nationalization took many people away from the land their families had worked for generations. But it also cleared the way for Bulgaria to put the inspiration for a modern garden city into action. 

Ashira Morris: And because they don’t have to go plot by plot by plot–neighbor by neighbor by neighbor–and, like, get permission, they are really able to do that on a scale that is bigger and more all-encompassing than it was able to happen in a capitalist society. 

Roman Mars: In the decades following the seizure of private land, Bulgarian city planners fundamentally transformed the landscape of Sofia. Where there was once farmland, a series of communist planned neighborhoods fanned outwards from the city center. The earliest of these neighborhoods all tend to have a certain distinctive setup. 

Andrew Anderson: If you think about college campuses that are very much a campus where you’ve got residential blocks for students that were built in the ’50s and ’60s–concrete and very minimalist. But they’re set in a park in a way that’s landscaped. And then it all drains into the center where there’s the bigger buildings, like the big library, the student union, and things like that. It kind of has a similar feel to that. 

Roman Mars: Sofia city planners were intentional about seemingly everything. They built apartment blocks in a specific orientation that would trap heat from the sun in winter without getting too hot in the summer. The buildings were also placed so that they would block the noise from surrounding highways. And on top of the housing, the new neighborhoods had all the basic amenities that you might need as a resident. There were hospitals, community centers, and schools. 

Ashira Morris: Everything was collectively planned. So, you have a kindergarten every 200m and the upper grade schools every 500m because, you know, a smaller child can’t walk as far. 

Andrew Anderson: It must have been an absolute wet dream for an egotist like Le Corbusier. And no wonder he was going to visit Moscow. He must have loved it. 

Roman Mars: Surrounding all of this new infrastructure were Sofia’s interblock parks. They were seen as an important way to put the government’s communist ideals into action. 

Ashira Morris: The urban planners under communism were really specifically concerned about everyone having an equal share of everything. And that includes trying to think of nature as something that you can equally parse. So, they wanted to make it so that everyone would have a certain amount of space in total. 

Roman Mars: Most apartments built around this time were small because you weren’t supposed to need that much private space. 

Andrew Anderson: So, it’s not very big. You don’t get a lot, but once you go outside, the green spaces between are just an extension of your apartment. It’s also part of what you’re living in. So, anything that you maybe don’t have in the house, you might have outside. “Okay, I don’t have anywhere to sit.” And you definitely wouldn’t have had a television, but there’s loads of benches outside. And there’s people to hang out with. And there’s climbing frames. There’s ping-pong tables back then with the net still on them probably. So that’s what these spaces at their best can provide. And obviously later, when they were left to fall to pieces, that makes it particularly disastrous because you don’t have anything else to fall back on. This should have been the thing that gives you the things you need to live. And if you don’t have those anymore, then it’s a bigger problem actually losing those spaces. 

Roman Mars: Almost as soon as the Communist government began transforming Sofia, it was running up against the limits of its own ambition. The first communist built neighborhoods had all the amenities. But the government couldn’t afford to keep them up. 

Ashira Morris: Under communism, there is a certain level of maintenance that comes from the city in the beginning. But there is also what’s called “Leninski Subbotniki,” which means “Lenin’s Saturdays,” which is this, quote unquote, “volunteer” work where the idea was that, like, the people in the blocks would go and kind of do the work of maintaining and cleaning up the spaces around them in these parks. 

Andrew Anderson: I would say this is “volunteering” with big air quotes. “Time to volunteer!”

Ashira Morris: Yeah, yeah. But as the decades go on, the maintenance just starts to fall off. 

Roman Mars: By the ’70s, many new neighborhoods weren’t even built to completion. There were neighborhoods without schools and parks without flowerbeds, playground equipment, or even benches. Here’s Sonia Hirt again. 

Sonia Hirt: I remember the green spaces between the housing blocks. They were not very well maintained, to be honest with you. During socialism, I think that we were simply running out of money. So, the state would invest in the most ceremonial places. But the more everyday places? They were going down. 

Roman Mars: Finally, in late 1989, the Bulgarian Communist Party reached the end of its long decline. In November, the dictator, Todor Zhivkov, was forced out of office. And by December his replacement was calling for free elections. Bulgarian communism had fallen. And as the dust cleared, the interblock parks were the last thing on anyone’s mind. 

Sonia Hirt: In the ’90s, it was a total collapse. I mean, honestly, it looked like a war had come. I mean, the least thing in the municipality to wonder about was maintenance. You just go there. It looks like, you know, there’s just garbage everywhere. I mean, no one’s cutting the grass. Nothing. 

Roman Mars: Bulgaria’s transition to democracy was peaceful, but that doesn’t mean it was smooth. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, there was a lot of optimism about democracy and capitalism. But now the new democratic government decided to undertake the absurdly complex task of identifying land that had been taken under the communist regime and giving it back to the original owners. Here’s another Aneta Vasileva again. 

Aneta Vasileva: This is called the Luchnikov act, and this was part of the policies in the ’90s to compensate people from this long-term socialist nationalization and state ownership. So, they returned the privately owned land, including agricultural land or medals or farmlands, to their former owners or their inheritance. 

Andrew Anderson: The situation just got more and more complicated. What started out as a very simple and, on paper, elegant solution–you get your land back–quickly became an absolute nightmare banquet of disasters. 

Roman Mars: Keep in mind, most of the city of Sofia was built on land that had been nationalized starting in the ’40s. And almost none of it was recognizable anymore as farmland. The government solution took that into account. Basically, if a building had been put on your family’s land in the last 40 years, you might get some minor compensation, but you probably didn’t get the land. The only way you could get land back is if that land had been left undeveloped through all of communism. 

Andrew Anderson: So, it’s very, I mean, well intentioned. From everything we found out about it, it seems like it came from a good place and that the execution left much to be desired. 

Roman Mars: In the middle of all this were the parks. Back when Communist planners set up their maps, they took for granted that they would never develop the parkland. So, the parks were never officially listed as “protected greenspace.” But now, in this new privately owned world, they weren’t listed as anything, which meant they could be given to private citizens and put up for sale. 

Andrew Anderson: And it’s only fair, really, if you’ve been given land back as compensation, why shouldn’t you sell it? The fairness of it was that you get this land, and you can do what you want with it. 

Roman Mars: The Luchnikov act rendered many parks essentially unusable. They were too fragmented to use and too hard to maintain. And in the end, many Bulgarians couldn’t afford not to sell. In late 1996, the Bulgarian economy collapsed, and inflation hit 2,000%. So, there were plenty of people looking to sell their lots. But there was really only one group of buyers wealthy enough to sell them to: Bulgaria’s newly minted oligarchs. 

Andrew Anderson: It would have been very easy for them to buy up all of that land during this period. So, for example, I’m sitting in my kitchen right now and looking out of my window from the seventh floor. I can see three different huge blocks that are being built. All of those are owned by an oligarch. 

Roman Mars: Today’s Sofia’s parks are mostly private–stuck in development purgatory. Many have been turned into buildings or parking lots, but some haven’t yet. And so, they just sit there, ignored by the city, and falling deeper into disrepair. 

Sonia Hirt: It was totally an eye-opening experience of how things have changed. 

Roman Mars: Sonia spent the first 25 years of her life in Sofia and remembers being able to walk between neighborhoods to get to her parents’ apartment just using the interblock parks. She recently returned to the city with her students and experienced the new construction firsthand. 

Sonia Hirt: It’s like a completely different space. I can’t even see the mountain to know whether I’m going south. I got to look at my phone. Sofia actually had more parks per person in 1989 than any city in Europe. Now it’s impossible to walk because all the green spaces have been built. So, when you’re walking, it’s a completely different sense because a lot of the former open, green spaces actually have barricades because it’s now a gated, private compound. So, yeah, I mean, the green spaces of Sofia have really diminished. I guess the good thing about it is that we had so much that even with the diminishment, it appears that we’re a relatively green city. But this is because the amount to begin with was simply massive. 

Roman Mars: Sonia says that in the first couple decades after the transition, a lot of people didn’t seem to mind that the interblock parks were going away. By this point, the parks were overgrown and crumbling–a reminder of what hadn’t worked under communism. 

Sonia Hirt: Because the failure was so spectacular, people just gave up on the idea. So, whatever the government does, it’s always with suspicion. “It’s the government. They can’t possibly be good.”

Roman Mars: Today, the city has that bourgeois fascist invention: the suburb. People put up fences and even mansions. In fact, Sofia residents have so thoroughly rejected the idea of public resources that many of these new mansions are actually on dirt roads. No one is funding the city to maintain that kind of shared infrastructure. 

Sonia Hirt: So, Sofia now has super fancy homes with zero infrastructure. Go figure. I mean, it’s just fascinating. Who could have predicted that?

Roman Mars: Still, all is not lost for Sofia’s interblock parks. The pendulum is swinging back, and attitudes about shared space might be starting to change. 

Sonia Hirt: I think now there is a sufficient amount of people–especially young people–who say, “Well, you know what? I think that’s absurd.” We still have to invest in our public spaces and the public realm. And I think the younger generation is going to be different than people who, you know, were 25 in the ’90s. 

Roman Mars: Andrew and his neighbors may be losing their park to new construction. But people in other parts of the city are also beginning to push back against development. And some have won. In other words, the fate of Sofia’s remaining interblock parks is still being written. In the meantime, some Sofia residents, young and old–people who lived through communism and people who didn’t–are busy doing what neither communism nor capitalism could manage to do. They are maintaining the parks. 

Ashira Morris: I went to one of the many parks that’s quite near the center that I had no idea existed. But I just kind of hung out there one day. And this woman, like a grandma, came out. And she’s kind of like muttering to herself a little bit. And she snaps a branch off of one of the overgrown trees and starts sweeping the pavers–all the leaves and dirt and trash and everything–with her branch. And then we sat and chatted for a little bit. She was just like, “Yeah, nobody takes care of this. And I come out here, and I do.”

Roman Mars: And this doesn’t feel like the Lenin Saturdays. This feels something different. 

Ashira Morris: Yeah. I mean, I think she’s old enough that she experienced them. And I think that is something that people sometimes say–kind of like, “You know, got to give it to the communists. They kept it clean–one way or another.”

Roman Mars: Next up, Kurt Kohlstedt gives us the primer on modernism and utopia, including the utopian vision of our good friend, Le Corbusier. That’s after the break. 

[AD BREAK]

Roman Mars: So, we’re back with Kurt Kohlstedt, digital director and coauthor of The 99% Invisible City. Hey, Kurt. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Hi, Roman. 

Roman Mars: So, in this episode, we touched on two important concepts: Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea and the influence of Le Corbusier. And these are such important concepts to modern urbanism. We’ve mentioned them in different ways in different shows over the years. But I wanted to dig a little deeper about these in particular and talk about them explicitly. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Sure. Yeah. Of course. So, we’ve got Howard and Le Corbusier who are important because of these different concepts of a utopian city. But not to be left out, we also have to talk about Frank Lloyd Wright–the man with the plan for everything, whether or not it’s in his wheelhouse. And he, of course, too, had an idea for built utopian environments around that same time. And to explain their three visions, I think we need to do a little crash course on urban design at the turn of the 20th century. 

Roman Mars: I am so ready for this. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: So, let’s back up a bit and set the scene. There’s the Industrial Revolution, which has changed how cities work, how people work, how we make stuff, and how we live. And there was so much rapid, unplanned growth and industrial pollution and a growing sense that cities were, you know, dirty places and maybe we could do better. So, Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright–they all agreed that cities needed to be safer, healthier, and more equitable. And they also shared a belief that incrementally fixing those kinds of current conditions in cities wasn’t going to cut it. They needed to make big changes. And in some cases, that meant starting from scratch. 

Roman Mars: So, their view was that cities were so dirty–so dangerous–they needed to be radically rethought. So, what was their proposal to fix that? 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Well, let’s start with Ebenezer Howard because he’s the oldest of the lot. And he called his utopian idea the Garden City, which was mentioned in the show. And we talked about urban greenery in that context. But there’s more to it than that. Howard’s thinking was that cities are just too big to be healthy and happy. But towns are too small for, you know, the new industrialized world. So, he had this hybrid solution, which was to start with a circular civic center–basically, like, a round shaped downtown. And the circle would be surrounded by a series of other circles sort of strung together like a necklace of pearls around the outside but, of course, also linked to that middle circle. And so, of course, all of this would be interconnected but also somewhat autonomous. 

Roman Mars: Yeah. So, I’m picturing this like spokes on a wheel, like, connecting the outer circles to the innermost one. Is that right? 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly it. And so, it was a spatial idea, right? But it was also a political one. He thought that at smaller scales we could break things up into pieces and power could be more decentralized. And people would then work together. They could share ownership and collectively build their own slice or circle of Paradise. 

Roman Mars: Well, I can certainly see how that dovetailed with the Bulgarian communists and what they were thinking at the time. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Oh yeah. Right. I mean, it very much aligns politically. And the name embodies this very physical idea of garden cities with rings of greenery around different nodes that was also aesthetically and sort of culturally appealing. And then there would be these rings of agriculture around the perimeter that would naturally sort of, you know, enclose the whole thing, limit expansion, and keep everything to this kind of ideal, utopian middle size–at least in theory. 

Roman Mars: Yeah, in theory. Utopias are always in theory. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yeah, exactly. So that’s the utopia #1–the decentralized, collectivist garden city. And then along comes Frank Lloyd Wright. Now he’s a famous, rugged individualist. And he has a rather different idea, which he calls “Broadacre City.” And in his utopian system, everybody would get their own small plot of land, which would be like a little farm, a little space, a little nature, or a little house. So, Wright thought that, you know, these big changes in transit and telecommunications were going to connect us into the future in new ways. And that with those big innovations, dense cities would just kind of become obsolete. So, on the one hand, he’s a bit of a futurist. But he’s also a bit of a traditionalist because he’s really obsessed with the family, which he sees as being threatened by the modern world. And he thought that they would find harmony in these, you know, individual sort of traditional American homes. 

Roman Mars: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this sounds pretty much like suburbia, though. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, like, a dressed up, kind of nicer looking suburbia on steroids because as much as people are spaced out in suburbia, you look at his drawings for this and people are spaced out even more. And so even though he worked with a lot of circles, too, it was pretty much the opposite of the Garden City politically because, you know, that was all about collectivism, right? This was always about individualism. 

Roman Mars: Okay, so that’s Howard and Wright. So, let’s talk about Le Corbusier, the architect’s architect. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yes, indeed. So, we’ve got the garden city cooperative with nature and Broadacre City, which is all about the individual. And then we have Corbus’ Radiant City, which is all about centralized power. So, in some ways it was like the opposite of Wright’s vision of distributed living. And in some ways, it was like the opposite of Howard’s idea of, like, collectivist control. In Corbus’ Radiant City illustrations, individual houses are just not there. People just live in these towering apartment blocks. And, you know, so while in the Garden City, you have these small nodes that are semiautonomous. The Radiant City is, like, this huge urban machine in which everything is centralized and planned out. And he compared it to a body and the various functions of a body. Like, every piece is part of the whole, but it all does its own thing. But it’s all just extremely regimented. And in between these tall structures, he too had green open space and tons of transit options. 

Roman Mars: So, in Sofia, it sounds like they were borrowing a bit from Column A in the Garden City and a bit from Column C, which is the Radiant City. We’ve got this collectivist approach and egalitarian ideals of Howard’s Garden City, but the central planning of the Radiant City. Plus, Corbus’ towers with large stretches of green space in between. But kind of nothing from Broadacre City, right? 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yeah. Not really. I mean, it was, like, the antithesis of what they were going for, right? They were scared of suburban development. They wanted something that was at least somewhat urban. And this was hinted at, right? Like, this is what they were talking about–how they didn’t want that American model to be their model. But the thing is, you know, for all of these differences and all these ways in which they’re polar opposites, they actually have a bunch of stuff in common, too. Like, they all were really into using geometry as part of the solution to really make it feel rational and mathematical. And a lot of optimism, too, right? They all had to believe that cities could be healthier and greener. And in listening to the episode, that’s what really struck me about, like, the experience in Sofia because in whatever form we all need and want access to light and greenery. 

Roman Mars: They were smart enough to know that these were fundamental truths and that no matter what you built in between, these things were required. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: The building blocks of a good city. 

Roman Mars: Thank you so much, Kurt, I appreciate it. 

Kurt Kohlstedt: Yeah. Thanks, Roman.

Roman Mars: 99% invisible was reported this week by Andrew Anderson and Ashira Morris. Edited by Kelly Prime with help from Chris Berube. Additional production from Jeyca Maldonado-Medina and Kurt Kohlstedt. Special thanks to Asparuh Delchev, Kalin Yanakiev, Mariah Taylor, and the experts from Екипът на София. 

Sound mix by Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid. Very music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Sarah Baik, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Martín Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Jayson De Leon, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building… in beautiful… Uptown… Oakland, California. 

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