Does it? What's happened in Chicago has many parallels with public housing projects in (some) European countries. There was a boom in large scale public housing developments in many European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these housing developments were large monolitic blocks. Some random examples:

- Droixhe in Liege, Belgium http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Vue_de_Droixhe.Jpg.

- The Aylesbury estate in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aylesbury_Estate_View.jpg.

- Chêne Pointu in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois https://www.flickr.com/photos/noobax/6188995903/

Many public housing developments were not stitched into the fabric of the city, but set apart from surrounding towns or city centres. The architects who built these blocks had the best of intentions (although some also had strong ideological views that influenced their designs). But today, we recognise that this style of overscaled, monolitic block design was a mistake. In the UK, the era of large scale mass public housing was largely over by the 1970s, but their effects linger on today in our attitudes to public housing and housing development.

Despite the run-down nature of many estates, strong social ties developed among residents. When estates are marked for regeneration, those ties are often broken as people are re-housed and dispersed. What does community even mean nowadays in cities when housing is snapped up by absentee investors and buy-to-let landlords with no interest in their neighbours or the neigbourhood?