I grew up in Western Germany and had to go to Schwerin for a job interview. I don't know what city planer committed this crime but whoever it is needs to be shot.

Completely apart from the fact that they have a fucking tram running through already damn tight streets of the old town, making you feel like a rat in a mace being hunted by a cat, to get from that city centre to the big settlement called "Großer Dreesch" you need like 25 minutes on public transport. They build 4 of those big settlements stock full of Microdistricts, or as we call them Plattenbauten. Between each of those big settlements and the city centre there once were several kilometres on green - just utterly wasted space, time, and money. The entire city is laid out as if somebody wanted to string pearl on an X - and the damn thing is weirdly smushed up against the big Lake and sprinkled among the smaller lakes, ruining perfectly good hiking area with living space. But it gets worse because west of city centre is a gigantic piece of almost entirely flat land that isn't constantly broken up by bodies of water, sprinkled among it are little farming villages.

They could have built the city into that direction, leaving the lakes undisturbed, rebuilding the main train station and making the city more accessible. They could have sprinkled normal housing throughout (multilevel buildings not gigantic towers) in that area and interspersed it with public buildings for community activity, parks, soccer pitches, playgrounds. Schwerin lost a quarter of it's population after the fall of the Berlin Wall and I sort of get why.