Byline: Martin Fletcher

The Aylesbury estate , a byword for urban squalor for 40 years, is to be torn down. Can planners get it right this time? Martin Fletcher reports

Red Lion Row, a tiny South London backstreet overshadowed by one of the bleak grey apartment blocks of the infamous Aylesbury estate, has had a bloody recent history. It was here, last Boxing Day, that a 20-year-old Nigerian-born asylum-seeker named Dipo Seweje was shot dead after being chased through the estate. His body lay undiscovered for 26 hours in a communal garden.

Here, too, in late 2005 an 18-year-old pastor's daughter, Ruth Okechukwu, was pulled from a car and stabbed repeatedly by a teenage Angolan immigrant for failing to show him respect. A bunch of long-dead flowers marks the spot where she died.

Now work is about to begin in Red Lion Row on one of Britain's most ambitious inner-city regeneration projects: the phased demolition and replacement of the entire Aylesbury estate, over 15 years, at a cost of Pounds 2.4 billion.

Some 2,700 flats in more than 40 monolithic concrete blocks on one of the largest estates in Europe - it covers 70 acres - will be reduced to rubble, one by one, and replaced by 5,100 new homes built on a mercifully more human scale. Some 7,500 residents will have to be moved out and housed elsewhere while their homes are successively demolished and rebuilt.

The project will end one of the country's more disastrous experiments in postwar municipal housing - an experiment that has made the Aylesbury a byword for crime and deprivation, the first port of call for politicians seeking to highlight the desolation of Britain's inner cities, and the backdrop of choice for film crews seeking the archetypal "sink" estate. Episodes of The Bill are filmed here, as were bits of Spooks and the snippet of urban blight that Channel 4 uses to promote itself between programmes.

It is a measure of how badly the planners got it wrong that, while the Aylesbury faces the wrecker's ball, the few Victorian cottages on the estate's fringes that escaped demolition in the 1960s have become desirable homes in a conservation area.

Today's planners are determined not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. This time the housing will be "tenure blind" so no one can tell which homes are privately owned and which not. It will be denser than the Aylesbury but no denser than most of London. And it will be eco-friendly, with a small utility company providing sustainable heat and electricity.

Every unit will have a garden, patio or balcony and be within 400 metres of a park. There will even be special bricks in which birds can nest.The aerial walkways will be replaced by green boulevards and proper streets with traffic calming measures. There will be better access to better parks, play areas, community hubs, improved transport links, cycle lanes and huge new leisure and shopping centres at a revamped Elephant and Castle, which...