In Magnitogorsk any observer could say that the city is in fact an emanation of the factory. This may not be all that far off. The primary organization in the city has always been the factory. The factory controls all of the housing, services, utilities and transportation. While this trend has been changing since the fall of the Soviet Union, the factory organizational structure has still left its mark on the city.

In the early days of the plant's construction, the housing settlements grew up close to the jobsite, rather than in the linear city model that the soviet planners had envisioned.  The housing was organized, or disorganized rather, in rows of barracks that sprang up in close proximity to the building site for the factory and to the ore mine.  By 1930 over 100,000 workers were living in such barracks.

The linear city model was developed early on by Earnst May in 1929 at the behest of the central soviet government.  May had come to the job because of his successful development of worker housing in Frankfurt, Germany.  The linear city model focused on short home to work commutes.  This general idea then led planners to develop a plan in which a central city strip would be aligned parallel to a strip of factory production.  The two would be separated by a greenbelt that would keep the noise and pollution of the factory from the housing.  A city model for a linear city would look something like this:

Earnst May ran into many problems in developing this city model, however.  The primary problem was that of geography.  The mill location was already set by the soviet planners and therefore May was left with only two other options.  The first option, the one that he preferred, was to locate the city across the newly dammed Ural River and to the west of the forming industrial complex.  This would provide the city with the greenbelt, but not with the easy access to work because of the lake separating the two. May's plan for the west bank was to look like this:

This plan could not materialize immediately because housing had already been developed close to the work site in the section marked with the numeral 2.  This site was then inspected for suitability as the new socialist city.  May developed the following plan for this site:

This location also proved to be less than desirable because it was located directly downwind from the factory.  This swept large amounts of soot, ash and sulfuric fumes across the worker settlement already in place.  The snow at this site was often black and grey during the winter due to the amount of pollution.

Since niether fo these sites provided all the answers that the central planning committee was looking for, they vacilated for a full year before commiting to building their socialist city on the west bank, out of the direct path of the fumes. Building finally began across the lake in 1932 dispite the fact that there were already over 100,000 workers living on the east bank and working on the factory.  The distance of the new housing from the center of building activity along with the problems in both workmanship and materials shot this new project in the foot before it had even begun.  Materials for building were always appropriated for construction of the mill first and housing second.  In addition, the plans for building the apartment complexes on the west bank were poorly executed when available and often not available at all.  This led to a great deal of shoddy work in this new housing settlement.  Residents in the newly completed socialist housing often were left without running water, plumbing, central heat, and drafty windows.  In addition, the linear city model was a bust in the steppe climate where the winter winds gust through the straight rows of apartments as if they were a wind tunnel.  This was remedied in later housing developments by organizing the buildings into squares with internal courtyards.

By 1933 May had left the country in disgust and disgrace when the Soviet government blamed him for all of the delay and mishap.

These micro-royans are lined up along wide boulevards in traditional socialist style.  Under the communist era, many of these boulevards were underused because of the low automobile ownership in the city.  Most of the cars belonged to the elite and the majority of people got around on the well organised tram system.  The tram lines were built to each micro-royan and followed the main routes across the bridges to the factory gates. Below we can see a good image of one of the trams in front of one of the main movie theaters in Magnitogorsk, along with a picture of one of the four main bridges across the lake.