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

Things tend to get worse as they scale. As startups turn to large corporations, they empty of meaning. The tight social bonds of a village fail in the big city. What goes wrong?

While he was consumed with the administrative details of the work he undertook, he was always aware of the Big Picture. He had the anthropologist’s ability to stand back, gather information, and make independent judgments based on the facts. This was perhaps his strongest character trait. Whether he was laying out a university or a municipal park s... See more

Finally, UCD’s focus on “successful” experiences obscures possibilities that lie outside of predetermined success metrics, preventing us from designing for uncertainty, failure, or experimentation in the ways we might.

Instead of empowering communities that most suffered under urban renewal, the local-review process has again privileged wealthier people who routinely block new projects, and many of the projects that do get built are in poorer areas.