City Planning at Crossroads

Are cities the best place to live? Are suburbs OK? A fight grows in urban planning, with Harvard at the center. “In their lectures and writings, Waldheim and other landscape urbanists paint the New Urbanists as nostalgically stuck in a conception of city life that ignores the changes brought by the modern service economy, the Internet, and the highway system. Americans have unequivocally demonstrated that they would prefer to live spread out, and the landscape urbanists argue it’s a delusion to believe that one can force the toothpaste back in the tube with zoning laws and design schemes.”