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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Planning is a perverse set of incentives. First it’s usually longer term thinking, where decisions made now impact the shape of a city decades out. Second, the people that live in a place now have undue influence and veer conservative in how land is used (ie NIMBYism). This often gives rise to at least near term stagnation (on a historical scale) in established, wealthy cities and growth in up and coming metros that don’t have a reason to preserve the current city planning policies.

I don’t know if there’s a solution. Cities may just go through decade long cycles of stagnation and revitalization as NIMBY generations die off, there’s less “romance” around the current character/ the place falls into disrepair, the city wants to attract new folks, and newer generations have strong demand for different modes of living.

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Among the most beautiful cities in world are those that were not planned, but were just allowed to happen. I don't know where we get the mindset that planning is necessary to begin with

How do you determine if planning or not planning is a causative factor? Maybe it’s just luck and maybe most unplanned cities do not survive to be viewed as beautiful.

I am sure scale of planning matters too, and that there was at least a little bit of planning, but perhaps smaller in scale.

The more evident factor in “beautiful” cities is probably that they came about before the advent of personal automobiles. They are much more pleasant to be in outside of a vehicle, and hence more “beautiful” simply because there were no vehicles at the time, and so whatever developed, planned or unplanned, had parameters that only considered people not in big boxes moving at high speeds.

Paris is usually cited as a beautiful city and it definitely has undergone some serious transformation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pa...

I live in one of those cities (Edinburgh). The old town (completely unplanned, grew naturally) is a beautiful place but utterly impractical for the size of the city now. The new town was meticulously planned and has fared much better.

Meanwhile, all of the brownfield sites that are appearing are being turned into student accomodation en masse; even with planning restrictions. I can only Imagine the state of the city if we just blindly allowed building.

This a very US-specific observation. While yes mid-century planners did some very stupid things and were kind of control freaks, the privately-held land baseline that preceded them is not at all universal. See the other posts' great examples.

Also, we now have the automobile to content with. The car is a like a gene drive, a self-perpetuating technology like we had never seen before, radically upending status-quo-ante system dynamics. (The reasons being a) Cars push everyone else off the streets, b) car-driven development spreads everything way to far apart for anything else to be practical.)

The market alone can't defeat cars any more than evolution can defeat gene drives. Only social failure / extension (and heaven forbid horizontal gene transfer!) can rain them in "endogenously".

You're right its long term thinking. A lot of people like suburbs, it makes sense to keep strict zoning for the benefit of the residents long term. That is true long term thinking, rather than quickly putting up luxury apartment buildings that no one will want to live after a few decades.

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