Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

[David Morris]

Yes, Yamasaki designed it.  And like the WTC it was standard modern urban
housing ideal design:  Raze many block of existing neghborhood urban
fabric, including street grid, creating a ground level "park" (AKA no-man's
land), and plop down high rise objects purposely divorced from the
surrounding context.  Just like the WTC in that regard.  Look at this site
photo from the air:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pruitt-Igoe_1968March03.jpg

That strategy is OK for an affluent office complex, but disaster for low
income housing.  Analysis of this and countless other very similar but less
publicized disasters produced a concept called "defensible space," which
show how the old neighborhoods with stoops, fire escape balconies, low rise
buildings where all tenants knew who belonged past the front door created a
self-policing environment.  The opposite of the towers in a field
environment, where everyone was assigned a unit accessed via elevators and
long corridors that keeps everyone isolated from ownership of a context
beyond unit door.  An ideal environment for crime.  Rich people have
doormen, gatekeepers, that make such isolation safer.

>  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensible_space_theory
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