Towers in the park

Towers in the park is a morphology of modernist^[1] high rise apartment buildings characterized by a high-rise building (a "slab") surrounded by a swath of landscaped land. Thus, the tower does not directly front the street.

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. It was introduced in several large cities across the world, notably in North America,^[1] Europe^[2] and Australia^[3] as a solution for housing, especially for public housing, reaching a peak of popularity in the 1960s with the introduction of prefabrication technology. The towers themselves are typically simple, brick or concrete-clad high-rise buildings with little ornamentation. The footprint was designed with simple geometry to minimise construction costs whilst maximising light, air, and views of the surrounding open space for occupants, sometimes including balconies for the apartments.

It is now generally seen as a failure in urban planning for the many problems it introduced in urban sociology including isolation and segregation from the wider community, a lack of privacy, as well as inefficiency in land-use planning. While it is increasingly popular in Asia, it has declined in the Western world. Many existing complexes, especially those government owned, are planned for demolition and redevelopment. Redevelopment of the complexes typically favour the antithesis of towers in the park ideology, mixed-use development, which is said to have more positive social outcomes including making people feel safer and more integrated with their community.^[4]