A dream no more

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33093, 7 December 1972, Page 7

A dream no more

(By

CLAIRE CUNNINGHAM)

LONDON. Can the height at which wou live really determine how likely you are to rob a bank or take part in a mugging? In other words, is there any valid connection between the soaring crime rate and the relentless rise of multi-storey flats? In the 15 years since high-rise flats first began to become part of the urban landscape, they have often turned from a dream into a nightmare. Now an increasing number of major cities, including Liverpool and Birmingham, are banning families with young children from tower blocks after research has shown that high living can sometimes cause violence, destructiveness, and serious mental stress. And from America comes the first detailed evidence that high-rise buildings mean high crime rates. A new report on housing by a New York University team of architects and social scientists shows that there are at least 70 serious crimes for every thousand families in New York City buildings more than 13 storeys high. With six or seven floors, the rate drops to 40 per thousand, and in three-storey flats, the figure was only 30 per thousand. But the most crime-ridden buildings were found to be those with what are called “double-loaded corridors” — flats on all sides of a central hall. In these buildings, the corridors, according to the researchers, are “nether worlds of crime and fear” where it is difficult to distinguish residents from strangers. No-one is yet quite sure why the height we live from the ground can cause such a mental upheaval, but the fact is that it often does.

A recent report by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Britain called high-rise living for families “restrictive, undesirable, and productive of a good deal of human suffering.” “High-rise neurosis” has become a recognised mental ailment, particularly among young mothers who become obsessed with fears about their children falling out of windows or down lift-shafts. It is even beginning to affect the children. Miss Iris Brooks, a former headmistress who has made a study of the problems of highrise living, says that youngsters feel cut off from the outside world and are often frightened of other children and unable to communicate easily with them. Small children living in high flats even show a lack of muscular and physical coordination because they used lifts in the flats and were wheeled in pushchairs out of doors. “Mild gymnastics are often frightening to them,” Miss Brooks says. “Often they cannot even cope with craftwork because they are not allowed to make a mess at home.” BAD TEMPER A London psychiatrist reports that among children, “high-rise neurosis” often takes the form of bad temper, poor eating and sleeping, and an inability to play on their own. “Because they have led a passive existence with their mother — cooped up with her and told to be still all the time — they develop quite a bit of inner rage which makes the child surly and aggressive with his parents.” American sociologist, Anthony Wallace, making a study of high-rise living for the Philadelphia Housing Authority, found that mothers often had difficulty in communicating with, and controlling, their children. And in Liverpool, a total of 2000 questionnaire forms filled in by families in multi-

storey flats has revealed that the major complaints were the danger of falling, lack of supervised playing space, teenage gangs roaming the estates, violence, noisy neighbours, and lift breakdowns. Ironically, the closer people are set together in high-rise flats, the more isolated they often become. As one social worker commented: “Women in these flats tend to act as if they live in stockades, locked in behind their front doors.” DEFENSIBLE SPACE According to the New York University researchers, this is because wives regard their flats as what is called “defensible space” and virtually cut themselves off from what is going on in the rest of the block. Many women, says the report, almost took pride in declaring that they know noone; had no contact with the family who lived on the other side of the living-room wall, and did not want to. High-rise blocks have caused so many social problems that an increasing number of authorities have now declared that they will not build any more. In Brimingham, for instance, priority is now for ordinary standard houses. In Liverpool, families living in tower blocks are being found ordinary homes as quickly as possible. The frustration of living cooped up in a high-rise flat is thought to generate a disrespect for law and order which can start in childhood. PIONEER Fourteen years ago, the late Le Corbusier, the worldfamous architect who helped pioneer high-rise living, declared: “Go from storey to storey and ask the mothers, the children, the fathers: has not a new life opened before them?” Certainly it has. The trouble is that it has turned out to be hardly the sort of new life Le Corbusier had in mind. — Features International.