Tower block

In contrast with low-rise and single-family houses, apartment blocks accommodate more inhabitants per unit of area of land and decrease the cost of municipal infrastructure.

[13] In Arab Egypt, the initial capital city of Fustat housed many high-rise residential buildings, some seven stories tall that could reportedly accommodate hundreds of people.

[14][15] By the 16th century, Cairo also had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple stories above them were rented out to tenants.

[16] The skyline of many important medieval cities was dominated by large numbers of high-rising urban towers, which fulfilled defensive but also representative purposes.

The residential Towers of Bologna numbered between 80 and 100 at a time, the largest of which still rise to 97.2 m. In Florence, a law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings should be reduced to a height of less than 26 m, the regulation immediately put into effect.

[17] The Hakka people in southern China have adopted communal living structures designed to be easily defensible in the forms of Weilongwu (围龙屋) and Tulou (土楼), the latter are large, enclosed and fortified earth building, between three and five stories high and housing up to 80 families.

Influential examples include Le Corbusier's "housing unit", his Unité d'Habitation, repeated in various European cities starting with his Cité radieuse in Marseille (1947–52), constructed of béton brut, rough-cast concrete, as steel for framework was unavailable in post-war France.

[24] Generally built to replace run-down terraced housing, the new designs included not only modern improvements such as inside toilets, but also shops and other community facilities within high-rise blocks.

[28] As another large example, in 2005 it was decided to carry out a 20-year process of demolition and replacement of dwellings with modern houses in the Aylesbury Estate in south London, built in 1970.

It is based on an ideology popularised by Le Corbusier with the Plan Voisin, an expansion of the Garden city movement aimed at reducing the problem of urban congestion.

[36] Neighbourhoods like St. James Town were originally designed to house young "swinging single" middle class residents, but the apartments lacked appeal and the area quickly became much poorer.

From its early days of implementation the concept was criticised for making residents feel unsafe, including large empty common areas dominated by gang culture and crime.

[39] Residential tower complexes are common in Asian countries such as China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Pakistan, Iran and South Korea, as urban densities are very high.

For modern hi-rises, there are two borrowed words to make a distinction: In South Korea, the tower blocks are called Apartment Complex (아파트 단지).

[44] Although some Central and Eastern European countries during the interwar period, such as the Second Polish Republic, already started building housing estates that were considered to be of a high standard for their time, many of these structures perished during the Second World War.

In the Eastern Bloc, tower blocks were constructed in great numbers to produce plenty of cheap accommodation for the growing postwar populations of the USSR and its satellite states.

This took place mostly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, though in the People's Republic of Poland this process started even earlier due to the severe damages that Polish cities sustained during World War II.

[46] Construction continued in the 1970s and 1980s, under the systematisation programme of Nicolae Ceaușescu, which consisted largely of the demolition and reconstruction of existing villages, towns, and cities, in whole or in part, in order to build blocks of flats (blocuri), as a result of increasing urbanisation following an accelerated industrialisation process.

[47][48] In Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), panelák building under Marxism–Leninism resulted from two main factors: the postwar housing shortage and the ideology of the ruling party.

In Eastern European countries, opinions about these buildings vary greatly, with some deeming them as eyesores on their city's landscape while others glorify them as relics of a bygone age and historical examples of unique architectural styles (such as socialist realism, brutalism, etc.).

Moreover, the ongoing changes made to postwar housing estates since the 2000s in former communist countries vary – ranging from simply applying a new coat of paint to the previously grey exterior to thorough modernisation of entire buildings.

[45] In the European Union, among former Warsaw Pact states, a majority of the population lives in flats in Latvia (65.1%), Estonia (63.8%), Lithuania (58.4%), the Czech Republic (52.8%), and Slovakia (50.3%) (as of 2014[update], data from Eurostat).

They were originally seen as desirable, but quickly fell out of favour as tower blocks attracted rising crime and social disorder, particularly after the collapse of Ronan Point in 1968.

Due to lack of proper regulation, some tower blocks present a significant fire risk and even though there have been efforts to make them more safe,[51] modern safety precautions can be prohibitively expensive to retrofit.

Divis Tower, built separately in 1966, still stands, however; and in 2007 work began to convert the former British Army base at the top two floors into new dwellings.

In the north of the city, the iconic seven-tower complex in the New Lodge remains, although so too the problems that residents face, such as poor piping and limited sanitation.

In middle-sized cities with a relatively low population density, such as Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Hamilton there are more apartment towers but they are greatly outnumbered by single-family houses.

In Canada, like in other New World countries, but unlike Western Europe, most high-rise towers are located in the city centre (or "downtown"), where smaller, older buildings were demolished to make way in redevelopment schemes.

Due to social problems within these blocks the Navy left and the Department of Housing took charge and flats were let to low income and immigrant families.

The best-known example of deck-access flats in the UK is Park Hill, Sheffield, where the decks are wide enough to allow electric vehicles; however, the design is inspired by French Modernist architect Le Corbusier, particularly his Unité d'habitation in Marseille.