Urban planning and urban poverty

1. Pruitt–Igoe
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe
Apartments
Ban Qusay Aldarwish

3. urban housing project
Architect :
Minoru Yamasaki
Location :
U.S. city of St.
Louis, Missouri

4. first occupied in
1954
Living conditions in Pruitt–
Igoe began to decline soon
after completion in 1956.
By the late 1960s, the
complex had become
internationally infamous
for its poverty, crime, and
racial segregation. All 33
buildings were demolished
with explosives in the mid-
1970s .

5. the project has become an icon of failure
of urban renewal and of public-policy
planning.
The complex was designed by architect
Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the
World Trade Center towers and the St.
Louis Lambert International Airport main
terminal.

6. Built during the height of
Modernism this nominally
innovative collection of
residential towers was
meant to stand as a
triumph of rational
architectural design over
the ills of poverty and
urban blight; instead, two
decades of turmoil
preceded the final,
unceremonious
destruction of the entire
complex in 1973. The fall of
Pruitt-Igoe ultimately came
to signify not only the
failure of one public
housing project, but
arguably the death knell of
the entire Modernist era of
design

7. The construction of housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe was a direct
response to the evolution of urban populations taking place in the years
after World War II
The rapid growth of American cities before 1920 had slowed dramatically, and even reversed in some cities –
including St. Louis, Missouri. More alarmingly for urban experts, those residents flowing out of the cities into
the suburbs were largely the wealthier classes, depriving businesses of their clientele and the civic
governments of their tax revenue. This mass exodus, they believed, left a vacuum which was gradually filled
with slums – the dreaded “blight” which could only be cured by being expunged. With the Housing Act of
1949, $1 billion (over $10 billion in 2017) was set aside to provide cities with loans for slum clearance and
redevelopment, sparking urban renewal projects across the United States.

8. In 1968, the federal Department of
Housing began encouraging the
remaining residents to leave Pruitt–
Igoe. In December 1971, state and
federal authorities agreed to demolish
two of the Pruitt–Igoe buildings with
explosives. They hoped that a gradual
reduction in population and building
density could improve the situation; by
this time, Pruitt–Igoe had consumed
$57 million

13. Authorities considered different scenarios and techniques to rehabilitate Pruitt–Igoe, including conversion to a low-rise
neighborhood by collapsing the towers down to four floors and undertaking a "horizontal" reorganization of their layout.
As the government scrapped rehabilitation plans, the rest of the Pruitt–Igoe blocks were imploded during the following
three years; and the site was finally cleared in 1976 with the demolition of the last block
Today, the Pruitt–Igoe site is about half-covered by Gateway Middle School and Gateway Elementary School, combined
magnet schools based in science and technology, as well as Pruitt Military Academy, school. The other half of the Pruitt–
Igoe site is made up of oak and hickory woodland. The former DeSoto-Carr slums around the Pruitt–Igoe have also been
torn down and replaced with low-density, single-family housing.