It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.
It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.
Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.
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[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.
[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.
It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.
Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.
--
[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.
[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.