Urban planning is a pseudoscience that seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.
Urban planning is often guilty of missing the fact that the sight of people attracts still other people. City planners oftne wrongly operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet.
Urban planning is often guided by principles derived not from cities themselves, but rather the behavior and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities.
Urban planning is often guided by a paternalism that wants to make impossibly profound changes and uses impossibly superficial means for doing so.
Urban planning is a western project which transformed from rational reform of physical space to a more expansive project of modern welfare.
Urban planning is a pseudoscience,much like bloodletting, where years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
Urban planning is a failure today because it has not yet broken loose from the small-town vision concerned with small-town values. What passes for city planning today is fundamentally a rejection of the big city and of all it means its variety, its peculiarities, its richness of choice and experience and a yearning for a bucolic society.
Urban planning is often not the rebuilding of cities but the sacking of cities. Our low-income projects are centers of delinquency and vandalism and hopelessness. Our cultural centers are unable to support a good bookstore. Our civic centers are avoided by everyone but bums. Our promenades go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders and our expressways eviscerate great cities.