In their comprehensive and scholarly history of the tower block in post-war British society, Glendinning and Muthesius [1] note that from the early 1960s (almost as soon as highrise housing was completed and occupied) there were sociologists and others researching the pathology of the new estates. We have been tracking this science as part of the Highrise Project. Drawing on ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS) we do not see the facts produced by such science as ‘given in advance’ or neutral, but as made by processes in which artefacts, technology, action, and cultural practices are intertwined.

The plethora of scientific studies of the highrise added grist to the mill of the emerging critique of highrise housing. In Britain this story of the rise and the fall of the high-rise was played out in sharp relief, partly because of the large proportion of housing stock provided by the government. Initial evaluations of these estates were not entirely negative.  For example, the Lansbury Estate in east London, once chosen as an exhibition of 'Live Architecture' in the 1951 Festival of Britain, was investigated just a decade later to assess user satisfaction with vertical living and the impacts of high density living on what was referred to as resident functioning in the city[2].[3] This study found that residents both liked the novelty of living high and 'did not share the experts' worries about high density'[4]. But just as this study found that residents were untroubled by highrise living so other studies[5] were less positive in their assessment of high living. In particular these studies pointed to the ways in which the highrise was antagonistic to the traditional role of women within the sphere of reproduction - specifically their ability to function as good mothers in an environment which, among other things, offered little for supervised children's play out of doors[6]. The weight of opinion from these studies was that highrise were unsuitable for households with young children, although they may suit other household types like, as Ash[7] describes them, 'singles', newly weds, the aged and a rather ambiguous household she describes as 'the cosmopolitan family'. Certainly the evidence that it was women who experienced more intensely the stresses of high living contributed to this form taking a central position in feminist critiques of the contemporary man-made city.

It is difficult to generalise about the finding of the many academic and government commissioned studies that were done of high living in the period from the 1930s to the early 1970s. But it is possible to say that the findings are actually more diverse than we might imagine looking back as we are from a point in time that seems to love to hate the highrise.[8]