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Tower and Slab – Histories of Global Mass Housing

Tower and Slab looks at the contradictory history of the modernist mass housing block - home to millions of city dwellers around the world. Few urban forms have roused as much controversy. While on the surface the modernist apartment block appears universal, it is in fact diverse in its significance and connotations as its many different cultural contexts.

This book traces the changeful course of mass housing in Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasília, Mumbai, Moscow, and Shanghai. Investigating the complex interactions between city planning and social history, it thus shows how the modernist vision to house the masses succeeded in certain contexts and failed in others, and how the serial block came to rouse harsh controversies like few other architectural types in history. I argue that design is not to blame for mass housing’s ambivalent achievements. The buildings did not produce the social situations they came to stand for, but acted as vessels, conditioning rather than creating social relations and channeling rather than generating existing polarities. The comparison of the apparently similar projects in seven different cities suggests that their triumph or fiasco did not depend on a single variable but rather on a complex formula that includes not only form and programming, but equally social composition, location within the city, effective maintenance, and a variety of cultural, social, and political indicators.

Routledge is one of the most significant publishers in the field. The book has been widely reviewed in journals and online platforms.

The book has been awarded the Annual Book Prize 2012 by the International Planning History Society (IPHS) for the "best book on planning history written in English and based on original research"