'The Art of Shrinking'; Europe finds it's not so easy to demolish the suburban housing experiments of the 1960s.(Cover story)

Byline: Stefan Theil and Tracy Mcnicoll

Mayor Jurgen Polzehl calls it "the art of shrinking." On the outskirts of the eastern German city of Schwedt, bulldozers have razed a series of 11-story prefab housing units, once known to residents as "The Wall" because the gray blocks obstructed the view of downtown. Built in the 1960s to house workers for the local oil refinery and paper mills, they were once celebrated as pinnacles of socialist achievement. Now 5,000 of the apartments have gone the way of socialism, and another 1,000 will follow. And that's just in Schwedt. All over Europe, there is a gathering backlash against the urban-planning ideals of the 1960s and '70s.

Target A is the vast public housing known as les cites in France, Plattenbau in Germany and "council flats" in Britain. With its national populations growing only slowly or shrinking, Europe can afford to demolish housing. And these projects, hatched with so much social idealism, have become synonymous with poverty, unemployment and the kind of unrest that saw riots in 300 French projects late last year. Four decades ago "we wanted the 'new city for the new man'," says Philippe van de Maele, head of France's Urban Renovation Agency. "It was all quite ideological, but we were wrong." The scale was too vast. One 20-story building in a project outside the French industrial town of Nancy stretched for almost a kilometer long.

The demolition campaign will be equally grand, in its way. Van de Maele's agency runs a [eurn]30 ...