Friday, July 17, 2015

Reflecting on this article, I wrote:

Much planning is done by architects, who are totalitarian visionaries. This is fine, when they are limited to perhaps a dozen acres, but a disaster when combined with city-wide 'comprehensive planning'. 'New' planned cities uniformly fail (or mutate from their original plan); this failure can be attributed to a lack of understanding of how cities actually function. Our efforts to address congestion through construction is a manifest example of this--we are trying to manage a system of interactions, but our conceptual framing of the system does not match the bounds of the system. Hence the need for the 'fuzzy' bounds discussed.