ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the commonplace view that multi-storey estates ‘destroyed communities’. In Glasgow major high-rise developments, initially celebrated as marking a new dawn in the city’s long history of poor housing, were cited as paradigm examples of social alienation and community disintegration. This chapter tells a different story about the development of community life on Glasgow’s high-rise estates. Using residents’ personal accounts to reconstruct a detailed history of neighbourly relations on such estates, it argues that the narrative of community failure has obscured a more complex social history of community development. The chapter shows community life was re-created on many estates during their early years, in a way that reflected the growing post-war importance of privacy and personal autonomy in shaping residents’ use and evaluation of domestic space. In this regard, neighbourly relations on high-rise estates mirrored wider trends whereby post-war economic and residential change transformed the nature of community life without destroying it.
