Between the Blocks
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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. I came for a summer to try it out, and I just fell in love with it.

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.

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. The apartment was in an old communist-built neighborhood called Slavia in an area called Krasnocello. 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. 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.

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.

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. There's a few different things that people call them. The main term is like Mezdu Blokove, which just means literally between the blocks.

These green spaces between apartment buildings in Sofia are also known as interblock parks. There's hundreds of them. They're not even fully documented, so you don't really know how many there are. 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 green space running through the city.

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 10 pieces of furniture in it. You know, with everyone with their clothes like strung all the way across the thing, sort of looks like an early Scorsese film or something like that. The park closest to Andrew's house is pretty typical of the form, if a bit more on the rustic side.

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.

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. 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.

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. My name is Ashira Morris, and I am a freelance reporter based between Sofia and Florida. Andrew and Ashira are both foreigners married to Bulgarians, and they shared a certain outsider's awe about the parks.

I think for both of us, these are spaces that like, especially as people coming in from the U.S. and the U.K., they just feel really special. And I feel like it's one of my favorite things about the city in a way. Sophia'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. 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 blocks. 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?

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 and Ashura 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. Sofia is a really young capital. So you have a place that has been a city, but not a big city.

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. 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 like organizing and rising up. It was mostly farmers.

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. And they're looking to this farmland and they're seeing this is kind of a blank slate. 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.

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 with their city planning. Here's architectural historian and critic Aneta Vasileva.

There is one architectural historian and theorist, Stanislav Fomos, who is saying that if you have to describe the post-war period in three words, these words would have been ruins, Stalin, and Le Corbusier. Stalin, ruins, and Le Corbusier also happen to be in every story pitch meeting we have at 9.9 P.I.

Anyway, the work of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier inspired the USSR to move toward open geometry in its urban planning. 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.

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.

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.

They talk about like having corridors of green air like 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. The dream of a fully actualized garden city quickly spread across the Eastern Bloc. The model seemed perfectly suited to communist ideals.

It was very important for them 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.

Sonia Hurt 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. 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 had a greater opportunity.

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.

I think it's just very utilitarian, isn't it? Like you need somewhere, like the minimum thing you need to live is an apartment. So you get an apartment, but the farmer'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.

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. 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.

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.

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, very minimalist, but they're sat 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, you know, the student union, things like that. It's kind of has a similar feel to that.

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.

Everything was collectively planned. So you have a kindergarten every 200 meters and the upper grade schools every 500 meters because, you know, a smaller child can't walk as far. It must have been an absolute wet dream for someone like an egotist like Le Corbusier. And no wonder he was like going to visit Moscow. He must have loved it.

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. The urban planners under communism were really concerned

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. Most apartments built around this time were small because you weren't supposed to need that much private space. 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 nets still on them probably. So that's what these spaces at their best can provide. And obviously later, when they were let 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.

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. Under communism, there is a certain level of maintenance that comes from the city in the beginning.

But there is also what's called Lenin's Ski Sopoňnitsi, 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 Među Blokoviđ parks. I would say this is volunteering with big air quotes.

Time to volunteer. Yeah, yeah. But as the decades go on, the maintenance just starts to fall off. By the 70s, many new neighborhoods weren't even built to completion. There were neighborhoods without schools and parks without flower beds, playground equipment or even benches. Here's Sonia Hurt again. I remember the green spaces within 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

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. The 90s, it was total collapse. I mean, honestly, it looked like a war had come. I mean, the least thing the municipality would wonder about was names.

I mean, that was like, ha, you just go there. It looks like, you know, there's just garbage everywhere. I mean, no one's cutting the grass, nothing. 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 Aneta Vasileva again.

It's 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 meadows or farmlands, to their former owners or their inheritances.

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 like an absolute nightmare banquet of disasters.

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.

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

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 green space. 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. 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 you get this land and you can do what you want with it.

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.

it would have been very easy for them to buy up all of that land during this period. So, for example, I'm sat 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.

Today, 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. It was totally an eye-opening experience of how things have changed. 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 intra-block parks.

She recently returned to the city with her students and experienced the new construction firsthand. 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, we 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 Soviet have really diminished. I guess the...

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.

Because the failure was so spectacular, just people 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.

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. So Sofia now has super fancy homes with zero infrastructure. Go figure. I mean, like, history is just fascinating. Who could have predicted that?

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. I think now there is a sufficient amount of people, especially young people, who say, well, you know, I think that's absurd. You know, 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.

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.

I went to one of the many parks that's like 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 baba, 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 start sweeping the pavers, like all the leaves and dirt and trash and everything, like with her branch. And then we sat and chatted for a little bit. She was just like, yeah, like nobody takes care of this. And like I come out here and I do. And this doesn't feel like the Lennon Saturdays. This feels something different.

Yeah. I mean, I think she's old enough that she experienced them. And I think that is something that people sometimes say of kind of like, you know, got to give it to the communists like they kept it clean one way or another. Next up, Kurt Kolstad gives us the primer on modernism and utopia, including the utopian vision of our good friend, Le Corbusier. That's after the break. ♪

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Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash invisible. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash invisible. Rules and restrictions apply. So we're back with Kurt Kolstad, digital director and co-author of The 99% Invisible City. Hey, Kurt. Hi, Roman. So in this episode, we touched on two important concepts, Ebenezer Howard's Garden City idea and the influence of Le Corbusier. And these concepts

are such important concepts to modern urbanism. We've mentioned them in different ways at different shows over the years, but I wanted to dig a little deeper about these in particular and talk about them explicitly. Sure. Yeah, of course. So we've got Howard and Le Corbusier who are important because of these

these different concepts of a utopian city. But not to be left out, we also have to talk about Frank Lloyd Wright, you know, 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 like a little crash course on urban design at the turn of the 20th century. I'm still ready for this. 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, 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 on that, you know, that cities needed to be safer, healthier, 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. 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? 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 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. Yeah. So I'm picturing this like spokes on a wheel, like connecting the outer circles to the innermost one. Is that right? 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'd share ownership and collectively build their own slice or circle of paradise.

Well, I can certainly see how that dovetailed with the Bulgarian communists and what they were thinking at the time. 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. Yeah, in theory. Utopias are always in theory. OK, exactly. So that's the utopia. Number one, the decentralized collectivist garden city, right?

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, 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

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. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this sounds pretty much like...

Suburbia. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very 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. And this was always about individualism. Right.

Okay, so that's Howard and Wright. So let's talk about Le Corbusier, the architect's architect.

Yes, indeed. So we've got the garden city, cooperative in nature, and broadacre city, which is all about the individual. And then we have Corbu's 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 collectivist control. In Corbu's 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 semi-autonomous, the Radiant City is like this huge urban machine in which everything is centralized and planned out. And he compared it to like a body and like 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. So

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 Corbusier's towers with large stretches of green space in between. But kind of nothing from the Broadacre City, right? Yeah, no, 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. Yeah. And this was hinted at the piece, right? Like this is what they were talking about, how they didn't want to that American model to be their model. Right. 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 like 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 Sophia. Because in whatever form, we all need and want access to light and greenery. They were smart enough to know that these were fundamental truths. And no matter what you built in between, these things were required. Yeah. The building blocks of a good city. Thank you so much, Kurt. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Yeah, thanks, Robin. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Andrew Anderson and Ashira Morris. Edited by Kelly Prime with help from Chris Berube. Additional production from Jacob Maldonado-Medina and Kurt Kolstad. Special thanks to Asparu Delchav, Kalyan Yanakiev, Mariah Taylor, and the experts from Ekiputna Sofia. Sound mix by

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

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You can find us on all the usual social media sites. And we just started a new 99PI Discord server. Come join me and the rest of the team to talk about the Power Broker, architecture, books, movies, any kind of random stuff, story ideas you might have. It's a good time. You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

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After a long, hard day, it's the perfect pour you deserve with the company you enjoy. Riuniti Lambrusco. The refreshing, lively, and easy-to-drink Italian wine. Riuniti on Ice, still nice. Imported by Frederick Waldman & Sons Limited, New York, New York. Campaign finance according to EU Reg 2021-2115.

Was it easy leaving the group chat when the bubbles turned green and every message was Cam likes this and Claire dislikes that? Oh yes, yes it was because I get enough overreacting at home. Like liking messaging again with WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.