“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 comparable controversies. While in the United States decades-long criticism caused the demolition of most mass housing projects, in the booming metropolises of Shanghai and Mumbai comparable buildings are continuously being erected for a wealthy middle class. As similar as the global modernist apartment block appears with regard to its formal characteristics, as diverse are its significance and connotations in different cultural contexts.

In the book the history of mass housing takes the form of seven narratives in different local contexts: Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasilia, Mumbai, Moscow, and Shanghai. The book is based on sources in six languages – English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese. It draws from both official documents and published studies, which were complemented by interviews with architects, planners, and city officials in the respective countries.

“Tower and Slab” provides a planning historical perspective on the evolution of what is best described with “modernities” rather than “modernity” – a socio-cultural setting that is both similar around the world and highly differentiated according to the local context. Investigating the complex interactions between city planning and social history, “Tower and Slab” thus shows how the modernist vision to house the masses in serial blocks succeeded in certain contexts and failed in others. Success and failure, in this respect, refers not only to the original goals – to solve the housing crisis and provide modern standards for the entire society – but equally to changing significance of the housing blocks within the respective societies and their perception by architects, politicians, and inhabitants.

Mass housing encompasses diverse typological, technological, economic, and social aspects. But it relied on two conceptual foundations, which originated in the late nineteenth century and soon came to be inseparably connected with the rhetoric of modernist architects and planners: first, the development of standardized design and industrial building techniques that profoundly changed the nature of residential construction, and second, a belief in egalitarian living conditions as a social goal and the paternalistic state as its most effective promoter. In a particular way, mass housing thus evidenced the contradictory nature of state paternalism, which next to its many beneficial aspects also carries the potential for oppression—assistance for the disadvantaged necessarily leads to the curtailment of individual agency. This contradiction played out very differently across the globe and had a significant influence on success or failure of these projects.

The differences show on a global level that design is not to blame for mass housing’s ambivalent achievements. The comparison of the apparently similar projects 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 factors.