"Funny how this kinds of housing works perfectly in Europe..."
Does it? What's happened in Chicago has many parallels with public housing projects in (some) European countries. There was a boom in large scale public housing developments in many European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these housing developments were large monolitic blocks. Some random examples:
Many public housing developments were not stitched into the fabric of the city, but set apart from surrounding towns or city centres. The architects who built these blocks had the best of intentions (although some also had strong ideological views that influenced their designs). But today, we recognise that this style of overscaled, monolitic block design was a mistake. In the UK, the era of large scale mass public housing was largely over by the 1970s, but their effects linger on today in our attitudes to public housing and housing development.
Despite the run-down nature of many estates, strong social ties developed among residents. When estates are marked for regeneration, those ties are often broken as people are re-housed and dispersed. What does community even mean nowadays in cities when housing is snapped up by absentee investors and buy-to-let landlords with no interest in their neighbours or the neigbourhood?
Occasionally it goes bad but I feel I left plenty of padding by claiming 90% of time it works in Europe.
This kinds of buildings don't necessarily need to be public projects. There are a lot of private investments like that.
And it works. It provides plenty of green spaces that make living pleasent while providing extraordinary privacy. You can easily live there for a decade without as much as knowing a name of any of your thousand neighbours or faces of more than 5 of them. People comming from smaller communities often value this newfound privacy and freedom to pick people to interact with.
It allows for proximity to public transportation. You are never farther than 10 minutes walk from a vehicle that can take you anywhere in the city.
It really works. You just have to design it for working people and their families that keep to themselves. Don't build too large, leave plenty of space and set up the rates so that not too many troubling people can afford that.
Two issues : living in the south of France is rather different to living in the big cities of the east coast USA, or in northern Europe. Cold, dark and wet mean that life is really different for the apartment dwellers.
Second, small changes to the implementation, minor drops in quality, alteration to the spaces create deep problems with the practice of living in these buildings. Implementing the vision of Corbusier requires genius, and genius is something that is in short supply.
Does it? What's happened in Chicago has many parallels with public housing projects in (some) European countries. There was a boom in large scale public housing developments in many European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these housing developments were large monolitic blocks. Some random examples:
- Droixhe in Liege, Belgium http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Vue_de_Droixhe.Jpg.
- The Aylesbury estate in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aylesbury_Estate_View.jpg.
- Chêne Pointu in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois https://www.flickr.com/photos/noobax/6188995903/
Many public housing developments were not stitched into the fabric of the city, but set apart from surrounding towns or city centres. The architects who built these blocks had the best of intentions (although some also had strong ideological views that influenced their designs). But today, we recognise that this style of overscaled, monolitic block design was a mistake. In the UK, the era of large scale mass public housing was largely over by the 1970s, but their effects linger on today in our attitudes to public housing and housing development.
Despite the run-down nature of many estates, strong social ties developed among residents. When estates are marked for regeneration, those ties are often broken as people are re-housed and dispersed. What does community even mean nowadays in cities when housing is snapped up by absentee investors and buy-to-let landlords with no interest in their neighbours or the neigbourhood?