I remember reading about London's commieblock estates being built on the same theory, but that due to the "streets in the sky" having no through traffic due to their designs it was a miserable failure and those estates became crime-ridden slums in record time.
It was even more retarded than that.
The major offender in that case was the London County Council, which adamantly refused to implement access control in any of the tower blocks they had built because "we refuse to perform surveillance on our citizens" (despite this being requested by their tenants in the late 1960s), meaning anyone could just walk in, steal stuff/rob people and walk right out again.
Another thing that didn't help was the fact that they had a big list of undesirable tenants (always drunk, just out of prison, junkies, gang members etc.) which they wanted to move out of their existing council accommodation, so every time new flats were built these arseholes were moved in
en masse. Obviously this created a crime problem from within.
This problem persisted until the mid-1980s and only got addressed because the tenants of the worst tower blocks formed vigilante groups and started killing rapists and robbers whom they caught in the act.
Around 1985 the GMLC (London municipality) made a lot of changes to their housing system (like putting in the access control that the people wanted, along with a measure where people could save up to buy their flats from the municipality).
I believe by this stage the British attitude towards "surveillance of the citizenry" had done a full 180°.
I vaguely remember that at one stage the LCC obstructed police from going into the council flats' public areas, but I must check this first.
This wasn't just a case of neglect, it was straight out active self-sabotage.