HUGE BUILDING SCHEME

Evening Star, Issue 22248, 28 January 1936, Page 2

HUGE BUILDING SCHEME

RECONSTRUCTION OF LENINGRAD A reconstructed Leningrad, intended to house 3.5 million people, allowing each of them 10.6 square metres of floor space, is embraced in plans which have recently been drawn up. The plans particularly emphasise methods of abolishing Leningrad’s historic menace of floods. Average living space for each person in the old Petersburg slums was from one to 1.5 square metres, and, in consequence, Petersburg’s death rate was the highest in Europe. Nevertheless, the new plans, despite the spaciousness of the living quarters, do not include the erection of gigantic skyscrapers. They provide for a socialist city, with a rational distribution of its apartment houses, factories, schools, and transport facilities. The average height of all buildings- will be five or six stories. The density of the population will be considerably less than to-day ; not more than 500 persons per hectare, as against 1,500 at present. With regard to the expansion of the city and the building of workers’ houses some miles out, the plans looking into the future, discount transport difficulties, since it is expected that Soviet automobile factories, in 10 years time, will have made it possible for most workers to own cars.