One Mayor’s Downfall Killed the Design Project That Could’ve Changed Everything

The outcome of these visionary projects, as described in detail by Scott, is nearly always a complex but dead system. A city void of life, with empty streets, unused buildings, unhealthy forests, poorer people. The high modernist visionary falls victim to their overconfidence, and skips over building the simple systems that work first.

What we want ... See more

The building was praised for throwing people at random. Because people were getting lost all the time and wandering into places they did not want to go. the building was a low rise and sprawling, which meant that conversations in corridors where a genuine conversation could develop rather than the eternal home of the glib, the elevator. More import... See more

I find an interesting parallel here to the ideas James Scott proposes in Seeing Like a State (which we covered back in RE #4): a top-down, central planning-style of design can't effectively predict the diversity of user needs. It turns out, contra to the "expert architect", that the users know best what they need from their space. And often even th... See more