Communist housing policy

The Communist regime believed that people were shaped by their environment. New uniform socialist housing, it reasoned, would produce a new uniform Socialist Man shorn of bourgeois individualism. Building socialism meant building panelaks (plus, of course, the minimal facilities of school, health centre, police station and prefabricated concrete pub.) 
Source: Rory Wilmer Photographer

"Communist housing policy had other and more brutal sides. In Prague, it tied the residents down in their city, offered them menial employment, and left them more or less to their own devices. But elsewhere—in Prostejov, for example, or the once beautiful Slovakian town of Povázská Bystrice—the Communists bulldozed the old town centers and stacked up the population in blocks on the perimeter, for the Party was anxious to destroy the past and the loyalties that grew in it."  — Roger Scuton

Taken aken from the  1999; article, "Sleeping Cities" City Journal,