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Owen Hathlerley's unswerving faith in the heroics of modernist planning is disturbingly charming. Does he really still believe that all that a city slum needs to jubilantly reinvent itself is the radiant city?

The reason that modernism failed poor urban communities is because it is so fundamentally unadaptable. Large buildings set over many hectares with ponderous functions laid down by dead architects over 60 years ago. How does an individual caught up in a large modernist housing development begin to influence a community that has been spatially arranged in such a pre-determined way?

They can't set up a coffee shop, as there are no older buildings to convert. They can't open a builder's yard, as all the outdoor spaces are all public. They can't even hawk the street, as there are no streets.

This is why modernist public housing projects have not worked. The only way out of poverty if you are stuck in such a development, is to succeed elsewhere, then leave.

The left may well need to develop an architectural approach that captures the imagination, but modernist planning practice is not it. It would be much more useful to treat modernism as an aesthetic movement, and drill into the politics of development and planning to find our answer.