Industrialised building manufactures large concrete wall and floor panels in factories and assembles them on site with cranes, allowing rapid, repetitive construction of housing blocks. Pioneered in France (Camus system) and developed massively in the Soviet Union as the Khrushchyovka and in East Germany as the Plattenbau, panel systems delivered millions of standardised flats from the 1950s onward. The method met acute postwar housing shortages cheaply and fast. Its uniformity and later disrepair made many estates symbols of mass-housing problems.
Panel prefabrication enabled the postwar housing of tens of millions but produced the standardised estates that came to define socialist and welfare-state urbanism.