High-Rise was the last of a trilogy of urban novels (Crash and Concrte_Island were the first two), written by J. G. Ballard in the early part of the 1970's. Although none of them was sold on their science fictional aspect, High-Rise has proved to be one of the most prescient novels of urban change written by an English SF author, as events have seemed to make its predictions come true.
Long before it became an item of party politics and financial scheming, Ballard set his novel in a redeveloped London docklands. The high-rise block of flats of the title is described as: "one of five identical units in the development project and the first to be completed and occupied. Together they were set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river" (page 8) Is this not what has happened? "For all the proximity of the City two miles away to the west along the river, the office buildings of central London belonged to a different world, in time and space" (page 9) Ballard saw that the new development must be imposed on the existing world, separate and distinguishable: "The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the run-down areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation" (page 9)
Not only did Ballard describe the new developments that would come, he also saw that the flatblocks of the sixties would become homes for the bourgoisie rather the rehoused eastenders, as has also tended to happen.