Absolutely! It's easy to find it wanting in comparison to middle-class Western living, but my East German relatives still wax lyrical about the day they got to

Absolutely! It's easy to find it wanting in comparison to middle-class Western living, but my East German relatives still wax lyrical about the day they got to move from the cramped, war-damaged room in an old townhouse to the apartment in the newly-built "Platte", clean, dry, "modern", washing lines on the lawn out the back by the playground on the way to the tram stop and the kindergarten, the doctor's kids playing with the factory worker's... It was an efficient way to provide decent living space with limited resources. And that's setting aside the question of why that system was so impoverished and what it chose to invest in. But the architects and urban planners deserve some praise.