In the 1960s, as European cities faced the dual pressures of accelerated urbanisation and the ideological imperatives of the welfare state, functionalist planning emerged as the dominant paradigm for organising urban space; driven by a belief in rationality, efficiency, and standardisation, planners and architects across Europe and beyond promoted large-scale housing developments based on zoning, modular repetition, and traffic segregation, often resulting in the construction of expansive residential blocks—monofunctional and peripheral—that embodied the ideals of modernist order while simultaneously fragmenting the urban fabric; these superstructures, from the grands ensembles in France to the satellite towns of the UK and the slab housing of Eastern Europe, were conceived as tools for mass housing delivery, but also as instruments of social engineering, embedding a technocratic vision of collectivity as homogeneity and predictability; however, embedded within this rationalist legacy lies a latent spatial intelligence: the superblock as an infrastructural frame capable of supporting ecological complexity, social proximity, and programmatic hybridity; reimagined today, the superblock can become more than a residual form of twentieth-century modernism—it can operate as a platform for urban regeneration, fostering pedestrian networks, green corridors, communal infrastructures, and inclusive public space; by shifting its logic from separation to integration, from control to coexistence, the superblock offers a spatial format adaptable to climate urgency and socio-spatial repair; not as a nostalgic return, but as a strategic reappropriation of modernist typologies through the lens of ecological and participatory urbanism, enabling a transformation of former instruments of discipline into living ecologies of shared urban life. Aureli, P. V. 2011. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press / Secchi, B. & Viganò, P. 2009. La ville poreuse. Genève: Métis Presses
