Is the demolition of the Heygate estate in south London the welcome end of a misguided experiment? Or is it the push for regeneration that is flawed? 
Council housing was seen as a natural mode of living, a much broader spectrum of people lived in it than was later the case, and the community[the orginal architect] says he deliberately set out to create worked. (Worked in every sense – as ever, joblessness and the resulting dependency and personal chaos are the elephant in the room, even when discussing rooms in the Elephant.) Only later, when people were only housed if they scored highly on an index of deprivation or social challenge and the council lacked the resources to deal with the attendant problems, did the "blight" begin. Software, not hardware; people, not buildings; politics, not aesthetics.
"If you think low income is vanishing, then it makes sense to reduce the amount of social housing that you've got. If you think low income isn't vanishing – and all the evidence would suggest it's not – then it makes no sense to get rid of social housing unless you've got an alternative for low-income people." [Anne Power's] question is a stark one. "What are you going to do about low-cost housing in a city that relies entirely on low-paid, low-skilled jobs for almost everything that its rich clientele depends on? Its hotels, its restaurants, its nurseries, its transport system, its street cleaning, everything depends on low-paid workers, and we are going to create one hell of a terrible society if we don't recognise that."
