An issue I have with this essay is that it assumes that it's the absence of central planning which gives rise to unlivable and automobile dominated cities.

But if you look at old photos of European or American cities before the rise of the internal combustion engine, you typically see a completely unplanned street usage: bicycles, pedestrians, horse drawn vehicles, kids running amok, etc. all sharing the space in seeming anarchy.

It required massive central planning to replace this shared space with segregated streets with 90% of the space dedicated solely to motorised traffic. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to allow central planners to run huge new traffic arteries through the centers of cities. Land was "opened up" for suburban development through central planning and massive centrally planned road and motorway building.

I guess my point is that associating "central planning" with liveable patterns of development does not seem reasonable to me. Central planning can and has been used for good and for bad - it was used to destroy urban environments in favour of motorised vehicles in some places, just as it's been used to promote much more liveable development patterns in places like the Netherlands.