Australian capital cities are going high rise in their CBD areas as part of the shift back to the city from the suburbs. Melbourne, especially the Docklands, comes to mind.
In his 1975 novel High-Rise the English novelist J. G. Ballard suggested that the nature of the modernist high rise buildings produces a “new social type.”
His argument is that high-rise flats incite maniacal aggression and perversion in ordinary people. High-Rise is about a 40-storey apartment block, and how from innocent beginnings it reduces people to murder, incest and above all a passionate love for chaos.
Geoff Manaugh, a writer and essayist who runs the BLDG blog, argues that Ballard’s sarcastic over reaction to the modernist high rise urban development is iilluminating. He says:
Ballard…realised — and articulated, in brilliant ways — what constructing huge high-rise apartment blocks, surrounded by empty parkland, would actually accomplish: domestic violence, race-based social segregation, and utterly pointless rivalries between makeshift gangs over everyday services.
The idea that buildings are innocent shells that can do no harm to anyone is a total intellectual failure.
While tower blocks in reality were mostly associated with social housing, often provided to the very poor, the High-Rise tower is a private development populated by the wealthy middle class probably comes closest to matching Ballard’s creation in real life. Despite its glossy, hopeful origins, things go rapidly wrong in the high-rise.
To overcome the isolation and boredom of tower block life, residents form clans amongst their neighbours and the block divides itself into three ‘classes’ – upper, middle and lower – based not on income but on how high or low people are within the building.The groups battle for control of the shared facilities, raiding rival floors.
As facilities like the elevators, rubbish chutes and electricity begin to fail, people leave their jobs, give up washing and shaving and are reduced to eating pet food and then their pets themselves. Indiscriminate, violent sex and eventually murder spread through the building as people indulge their every random instinct. Eventually the residents enter a kind of primal state where they begin to forget their own and each other’s original identities and in some cases even lose the use of language.
What makes High-Rise stand out is the way this outbreak of seemingly regressive energies is directly made possible by the modern developments that were supposed to improve society: utopia flips into dystopia.