We certainly can't say we haven't been warned. The key reference here is novelist and prophet J.G. Ballard's "High-Rise" of 1975. It was the time when council tower blocks had fallen from grace, when previously optimistic phrases such as "streets in the sky" and "vertical city" took on a sinister meaning. Ballard's novel imagined an upmarket equivalent - an expensive private-apartment slab block, rising to 40 storeys, wide enough to hold 1,000 flats. Despite the fact that Ballard's fictional high-rise contains a school, shops, bank, swimming pools, sports centre, rooftop observation terrace and an intermediate sky lobby the size of an aircraft carrier deck - pretty much the facilities we see again proposed for real in Skyhouse - it does not take long for things to go wrong. Ballard's tower is set two miles east of the City in the area that was later to become Docklands, and so presciently anticipates Canary Wharf. It has a malign influence on its inhabitants. Civil war breaks out between groups of people on rival floors. Communal facilities are fought over and eventually wrecked. Social order breaks down completely, as do the block's lifts, airconditioning, electrics, chutes. Isolated in their tower, the wealthy inhabitants become savage warring tribes that rapidly evolve into a new primitive, matriarchal society: one that Ballard seems to rather approve of. Phew - just think of all that when you're slapping down your deposit on a pricey small apartment in one of Britain's new generation of high-rises.

Far-fetched this dystopian vision may be, but - to return to the question posed at the start of this piece - what sort of society will the real high-rise Britain be? It all comes down to whether you think we've cracked the old idea - essentially an early 20th century idea of the pioneering modern architect Le Corbusier - of housing whole communities up in the air. If the technology, the social mix, and the management have improved enough since the mistakes of the 1960s, then there is no reason why not. The received wisdom is that towers are better designed, by better architects, and made out of better materials, than they used to be. Skyhouse certainly shows some impressively advanced structural thinking, even if its social ideals could not be described as particularly original. And if this is what it takes to save the countryside from sprawl, then it's an attractive alternative. Farming may be in the doldrums, but the countryside is increasingly a recreational rather than an agri-business sort of place, new forests replacing old prairies.

How long-lived the phenomenon will be is another matter. The leader of Britain's architects, the admirably free-thinking president of the RIBA George Ferguson, has his doubts about high-rise. "I'm not an out-and-out fan. I'm equivocal," he says. "It's a minority sport, not a mass solution in my view. Technology allows us to do this, but that doesn't necessarily make it right. I'm concerned that we might be diving blindly into the whole thing. But is seems it's now de rigeur for every signature architect to design a skyscraper."

True enough. Developers like them, most architects like them, big business likes them and increasingly, it seems that we like them too. So expect a lot more of them. And when you gaze across the green fields of Albion a few years hence and see them marking the cities on the horizon, consider this: if it wasn't for them, maybe those green fields wouldn't be there at all.