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.