Could this be the new Pruitt Igoe?

In the area Hatert, at the edge of the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, the housing corporations Portaal and Talis organize a great renewal operation. Most of the current housing does not comply with contemporary standards or needs a substantial make over.

72 apartments and a healthcare center. The irregularly shaped balconies project from each corner of the 13-storey-high tower, which was recently completed by Rotterdam studio 24H architecture. “We had a flower in mind,” says Boris Zeisser of 24H. “The balconies were designed to look like white petals and an overall organic shape was intended to evoke the image of a white rose.”

So it was with the public housing/renewal projects of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. One of the most famous, Pruitt-Igoe of St. Louis came down in the 1970s. They had become cesspools and slum housing, festering towers of crime. Ironically, Pruitt Igoe was designed my Minoro Yamasaki, designer of the World Trade Center. Now a new film on The Pruitt-Igoe Myth "argues that the dysfunctions that prompted the Pruitt-Igoe demolition were not inevitable—that crime, violence, and vandalism were products of a negligent maintenance regime, poor financing, and poor design, as well as what New School urban studies professor Joseph Heathcott, an interviewee, characterizes as the use of public housing as a means of “planned segregation.” Freidrichs’s film is a well-crafted mix of retrospective interviews of residents and archival footage from local news sources." Howard Hosack of City Journal says the documentary is a victim of myths of its own. The fact is, the government is no better landlord than it is a step father, and the public housing actually hurt the people it intended to help. Because of preference given to single parents, fathers voluntarily left their families so they would qualify for the new housing, thus in the grand government tradition, making matters worse. ". . . blacks were robbed of the opportunity to advance through their own efforts, to build assets, and to forge communities. They—and Americans generally—continue to pay a steep price for ill-conceived projects such as Pruitt-Igoe."

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.