"In the terraces of two-up two-downs, people could talk over the garden fence but in the towers they became strangers to each other."

At Spitalfields Life, there's a striking set of images (from 1962-82) by John Claridge which show the old slums of London's East End, and the tower blocks (high-rises) which slowly replaced them. These images are eerily similar to ones I've seen of Chicago's South Side in the fifties and sixties, where a similar effort at urban renewal turned out to be an utter failure. Today, few of the CHA high-rises remain, having been demolished over the past fifteen years and mostly replaced with low-rise townhouses. You might think that the failed American experiment in high-rise public housing would have been a cautionary tale for today's urban planners, but as Spitalfields Life indicates, new tower blocks are still being planned for London. Those who ignore history...