Gordon MacGregor
A madman's dream

This week brought the tragic news that three people hurled themselves from the 15th floor of a tower block in Glasgow's Red Road. The media could only speculate what drove them to this extremity but the reporting was coloured by an unstated premise that there is something inherently dismal about this area. The BBC noted that it was a 'less than salubrious' part of Glasgow and there were constant reminders that the flats 'lack facilities' and are 'scheduled for demolition'.
     When I was a student in the 1990s, I Iived in a block in the Red Road and spent some time in the YMCA building where this family were housed. It was a happy time for me and I would agree with the sentiment – if not the motivation – of the song that stated 'it's fun to stay at the YMCA'. But then, I was not uprooted from my home, worried for my family's future, haunted by feelings of dislocation and living in constant fear of that ominous knock at the door.
     The flats were still maintained at that time, and provided a focus for international students. The YMCA block was especially attractive since some of the floors had been dedicated to sports and leisure facilities. It even had a restaurant at the top. But for a migrant family from Russia I believe this would be a hellish place to end up: a stark reminder of the Stalinist housing projects from which they may have fled.
     Sadly, our tower blocks owe their design to an architect more lauded than Stalin but equally culpable in his folly and disregard for human value: Le Corbusier. In the post-war scramble to escape the ageing slums, many saw his ideas as a cost-effective solution. Indeed, new residents may have thought they were going to a 'vertical village' with 'all mod-cons'. But Le Corbusier's designs – on which all of these tower blocks are based – are grounded in a very different philosophy. While a village has a centre, a focus for social interaction, these towers are deliberately anti-social.
     Le Corbusier – a drinking buddy of Albert Camus – believed that man should discover his true nature through silent, lonely contemplation and that modernism would facilitate this end. The commute home would be 'conducted swiftly along the multilevel, traffic-free superhighways. The evening meal would be delivered by catering services. The walls of the apartment "cell" would be soundproofed against neighbours. The views outward would be of trees and sky – nothing else'. In the end, Le Corbusier said, 'a basic human need had to be fulfilled, that of personal solitude. When the door is shut, I can freely enter my own world'.
     Given his obscure opinions, it is unsurprising that every aspect of Le Corbusier's city was designed to keep people apart and maximise the amount of time that they spent alone. In our need for cheap, efficient housing we may have inadvertently given expression to this madman's dream. Undoubtedly, the flats may have been tolerable to working families with strong social ties to the area. But by placing vulnerable, dislocated people in buildings conceived around such a pathologically dangerous design philosophy, we could go so far as to say that the council has breached a duty of care.
     It is no wonder that tower blocks have come to be seen as dangerous. Novels like JG Ballard's 'High-Rise' and films like 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Red Road' have played on this apprehension of menace but their fears are not unfounded. The anti-social design and lack of social focus meant that people were unsure about the ownership of public space around the blocks. Inevitably this led to vandalism and hastened the signs of urban decay.
     The provision of some social focal point – a place of interaction – is a crucial factor which these asylum seekers are denied. They do not live here, they merely eke out a contingent and contested existence, like economic musselmen. We may talk about 'dispersal' but that is only true on a national level. Locally, they are concentrated in our very own District 9. Sadly, the design of the Sighthill and Red Road blocks only serves to isolate them further, even where they are concentrated.
     Jane Jacobs, the champion of localism who wrote 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities', argued that 'real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings - sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever'.
     To put dislocated people in these flats – to exacerbate their dislocation and isolation – is at best unhealthy, at worst vindictive. They need, to borrow a phrase, 'care in the community'. Or as Jacobs simply put it: 'I think people need other people'.

Gordon MacGregor is a lawyer