In the Czech Republic you can sometimes see buildings that just don't really fit the landscape, the cities fabric, sometimes to a comical extent. Pictured here is a street, an old street to the left which just kind of ends and gives away to this big empty space and then this space is closed off by a big commiblock. There are a great number of examples like this and turns out there's a reason for it, that reason being deliberate and planned barbarism. Speaking of which, let's talk about Czechoslovakian city planning. From the 50s and 60s onwards, Czechoslovakian city planners had the same ideas as pretty much everyone else in the Europe and America. These ideas were basically that cars on the future, cities must accommodate cars above all, pedestrians should be separated from car traffic mainly through underpasses, but also other methods. Public transportation was imagined as a mix of metro, bus and maybe trolling bus. Trams were considered obsolete and feet for removal and the metro was supposed to be the big backbone complemented by smaller bus lines or twirlines maybe. And of course this entire system was to be framed by a system of urban highways. A particularly atrocious example is the Prague-Magistrala which is an urban freeway that basically just cuts the city in half and not only does it do that, it creates this weird island around the National Museum among other things. But we're not here to talk about Prague but a city called Ustina-Dloben, formerly Ozig, which is halfway between Prague and Dresden. Its population is about 90,000, used to be a big industrial center in the North of the Czech Republic up until the Velvet Revolution, the regime change and the subsequent collapse of industry. And this was the place where the Czechoslovakian leadership just really went all out with their city planning ideas which can only be characterized as extremely bizarre. So let's recap some of Ustina's history. It was a historical industrial center since the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that's the 19th century. This brought in a lot of workers, the industries, mostly Germans. And in the beginning I mentioned that it was called Ozig, that's because it was basically a German city up to the Second World War. In the 1930 census, the city had 43,793 residents of which 32,878 were German, 8,735 were Czechoslovak, 222 Jews, 16 Russians and 11 fellow compatriot Hungarians. In 1938 of course the city was taken over by the Nazis and towards the end of World War II the city was taken back by advancing Soviet forces. But the point where the city changed forever basically was the summer of 1945 where the so-called Ustim massacre happened. When an MOD poll exploded killing around 27 people, seven of whom were Czechs and this somehow triggered a massive lynching of Germans in the city. The official number of victims ranged from 80 to 120 but some estimates go all the way to 4000 which is most likely overshooting it. The psychosis was so incredible that at one point a mother and her baby were thrown into the albe from a bridge and then shot at by soldiers. And after the revolution it turned out that this whole thing was actually orchestrated by the Czechoslovakian secret service to make a better case for the expulsion of Germans into Germany in which they succeeded and the vast majority of the city's original population was just basically deported. So here we are after the war in the 50s, 60s. The industry is being rebuilt, new residential complexes are being erected and new people are being shipped in. The war didn't damage the city as much, the overwhelming majority of the city fabric is still undamaged. So what was the Czechoslovakian leadership's idea for urban planning? They wanted to turn Lucian Adleba into a model city with all the latest innovations in planning and shine new architecture. In practice this mostly meant styles such as Soviet modernism and brutalism and of course your average blocks of flats. The plan was to move people and mass to large residential areas around the center and turn the center itself into an exclusively governmental slash commercial district with brand new architecture. The only problem was that the city was already there and in such cases you can't really make big changes and you shouldn't either unless it's absolutely necessary. So the Czechoslovakian government said okay and then they just started blasting. Entire blocks were just completely leveled. This meant blowing up multiple dozens of buildings including most of the main street only to be built back up with gray blocks and turns out these architectural styles don't really age too well especially if they aren't maintained. So half the main street was essentially leveled which meant blowing up 19 apartment buildings simultaneously which is an all-time record in a country. For this they had to custom design a demolition switch that had twice the capacity of the best devices at the time able to detonate 20,000 demolition charges at the same time. So in 1980 half the main street was blown up but the leadership was just getting started. The stretch of this district in particular an entire neighborhood called Kremoli was leveled. The plots of which have not been built up to this day. Another is a couple of giant open fields instead of you know housing for people. According to the original plans in the city center only the church and a bank building were to remain. That's two buildings into total. Everything else was planned to be demolished eventually but thankfully most of these plans could not be realized due to a lack of money. This is how the main street's second half was saved by the way they just ran out of money. That being said large scale demolitions went on all the way until 1989 the revolution and in some cases continued to this day all the way in a smaller scale thankfully. For example next to the Zapagnina Dragitrain station these two and half blocks are mostly gone by now. Here's a picture I took a few days ago as you can see most of the buildings are gone with the rest are also sort of slated for demolition. And looking at Google Street View these buildings weren't in such a bad shape. I mean of course they were like completely neglected and not maintained but these are massive brick apartment buildings. I mean these these things aren't just gonna fall down as far as I know most of the buildings were structurally sound. The buildings were bought by a local politician slash businessman who planned to turn them back into apartment buildings but this of course never happened. So instead what we're gonna get here is a little instead of you know housing and not just any housing. I mean these plots literally overlook the future site of the high speed rail station on the Prague-Dressed and high speed railway. Oh and by the way on these empty plots I showed you earlier in Streckhove guess what's going to be built here a little. So I don't know if there's a conspiracy going on between little and the city but it's strange to say the least. So after the revolution the Megalomanian plans were axed of course but as the interstitial line the city was faced with a new problem that needed urban planning solutions namely the situation with the Roma who were mostly forcibly relocated from Slovakia to do unskilled labor in the local factories but of course the industry collapse stand with it the façade of order that the Czechoslovakian leadership put up throughout the years and all the social problems came bursting up like a volcano essentially mostly with the local Roma community problems included poverty, lack of opportunities, low level of education, high crime rates and so on. This situation lasted for years while the local government was essentially doing nothing to address these issues. You know from a city planning perspective when an area is at risk of becoming a ghetto what you do there is launch social programs make sure kids attend school properly you help train people for getting new jobs maybe even buy out some of their homes and help them relocate or you know increase police presence in the area but since the affected people were Roma of course none of this happened and instead their neighborhoods were just basically left rot with all kinds of social problems very quickly spiraling out of control. So when problems became unbearable in one particular neighborhood the city decided it's time to do something finally in the form of building a 2 meter tall 150 meter long wall to separate Roma residents from non-Roma and this is the equivalent of me coming home and noticing that the bedroom is on fire so I just lock it door and go to sleep in the living room. The offense stood for a grand total of five weeks after which it was torn down due to public pressure even but slap have al himself came to us to handle the situation. After this fiasco the city was given some grant money to help solve the social problems but they went ahead and used this money to buy out the apartments of the non-Roma in the area and essentially evacuating them out thus creating a Roma only ghetto. So their strategy is basically to ignore social problems and let them run for a while and then just bitch about it. So that's Czechoslovakia and urban planning for you. What really has done on me during my research for this video is the almost sociopathic and negligence of the authorities both for the built environment and for the people. And honestly I don't think I've ever seen destruction of historical buildings on this scale outside the US but hopefully Ustina at Labem will become a lesson for future urban planners one can only hope. Anyway thanks for watching and if you have a historic city center please don't blow it up.