[WesternCulture]

"Very interesting example of govt. social engineering and it's unintended results."

Yes it is.

Apart from the role of the politicians in this case, it's also strange how this architecture was once "beautiful" to a majority of Western architects.

A big, gray, concrete box is nothing but a big, gray, concrete box.

I lived in such a house for one year, namely my first year in life, 1969-1970. Then my family moved to a nice place to live. Much to the disappointment to politicians and architects involved, most other Swedish families in our situation did likewise after having lived for a short time in these kind of areas. Then the Italians, Yugoslavs and the Greeks arrived. By today, most of them have made good money from working for Swedish industry or running small, family owned, private businesses which have allowed them to buy houses/attractive condos elsewhere. The Swedish concrete "ghettos" are safer than one might think, although a rather large degree of petty crime exists. The most infamous such area in Sweden is Rosengård in Malmö. Large parts of Malmö is very nice though. There are several articles about Malmö here on FR I've noticed (search them by using "Malmo" as keyword if you're interested).

[TheKidster]

Thanks for the insight. It's funny how social engineering always banks on people accepting mediocraty when, invariably people tend to work hard to better thier situation and move up the socioeconomic ladder. Social engineers also seem to always believe that culture remains static within a society (architecture in this case) and people won't abandon the old and used for the new and shiney.