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Comment by doitLP | Hacker News Reader

I found Seeing Like A State even better at really elucidating the problems with planned cities. Some portions of it were heavily influenced by Jacob’s work and was completely eye-opening to me in many ways, not least of which is how most such large scale planned initiatives are doomed to failure at the outset by plans that don’t account for the real world.

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Glaeser speaks approvingly of at least one planned city, namely Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the late 19th C.

If these large scale planned cities are doomed to failure, will they simply be completely abandoned in 20..40 years.. or will they be repurposed, perhaps surrounded by tent cities or shantytowns, and find a way forward?

They’re no more doomed to failure than other planned cities like Milton Keynes[1] in the U.K., Pudong District[2] in Shanghai or Almere[3] in the Netherlands. Sometimes urban planning is done really well, as in Singapore or in the original planning of Manhattan. Sometimes it’s just a disaster, as in Dubai where there’s no municipal sewerage network and there aren’t really street names and addresses as normally understood are useless or non-existent. Sometimes governments let people who hate people design cities because they’re famous, like Le Corbusier and Brasilia. All of these cities work to different extents. They may have glaring problems but people live in them and there’s enough economic activity that they’re growing.

Large scale planner cities are not doomed to failure. Some of them will be done well and thrive and some will be utter disasters, losing all the investors’ money and plentiful public funds. But given the pace of urbanisation in the developing world massive planned city building or expansion of the existing cities is inevitable.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudong

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almere

I have noticed that the main failing of planned cities seems to be the megalomania and misguided sense of organization trying to decide how it will be used specifically - often out of some misguided ideal of efficiency instead of leaving it to the people to decide. It brings to mind having a single restuarant outside every cul de sac and expecting residents to go only for the nearest restaurant.

Sanity calls for embracing the non-deteminism. Wall Street wasn't intended as a world financial center but that is what it wound up as.

I suspect a "modular garden" approach works best as a balance of setting up infastructure and zoning for purposes to be filled on demand. Japan at least has apparently had luck with building train/subway line loops, selling land to developers and renting out retail spaces in and near stations.

The point of the book was not that they had to fail, but they would fail if they designed in isolation and didn’t take into account how cities are used and the processes that allow them to grow and change.

Half way through reading this now actually and can't recommend it enough.

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