Their uncompromising architecture only serves people that do not exist, and there is a reversal: the inhabitants have to adapt to inhuman conditions. However, the buildings offered dismal living conditions marred by structural problems and insufficient social and green space, which tended to isolate and alienate their inhabitants. After the Second World War, movements of urban regeneration ensued, and tower blocks were introduced, designed to be affordable, practical, and egalitarian. Well since the Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875, Britain has been concerned with improving urban housing. The fact that is alluding to a real-life situation-high-rise living is a reality in Britain and other countries-marks the novel as one that is firmly grounded on reality and has claims of social relevance, a rather uncommon trait for a Ballard novel. This is Ballard as his most dystopian, pushing to extremes all the tensions generated by high-rise living and exploring the social and mental breakdown of this failed modernist project. High-Rise takes its starting point from the architectural theory of the modernists and their utopian, self-contained cities aimed at solving the problems of highdensity housing. Gasiorek writes that these two novels "are situated at opposite ends of the civic spectrum: one exposes the hidden byproducts of contemporary life, while the other concentrates on its dreams of rational design" (120). It allows him to create a microcosm of British society, in clear contrast to the individuality of Concrete Island, and to show how the strange events occurring in the high-rise affect the behavior of the three men-and their respective social classes-differently, implying that the segregation is not only physical or economic, but primarily mental. This is the only time Ballard adopted this formal division, which greatly enhances the novel's attempt at social critique and relevance. The tripartite division follows the building's own physical segmentation of social classes: the richest on the upper floors, represented by the high-rise's architect Anthony Royal the poorer on the lower, represented by the documentarian Richard Wilder and in middle-class, we have Robert Laing, a university physician, a more typical Ballard protagonist. Contrary to the survivalist narrative of Concrete Island, which reduced social life to its bare minimum, High-Rise (1975) resorts to some conventions of social realism, foregrounding naturalistic concerns with social anthropology and objectivity, made evident by Ballard's use of third-person narration and the one-off use of three different narrative perspectives.
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