Consensus, but Progress?

If Bob Dylan were to look at urban development, he might say that the times are-a-changin’. There’s a new consensus emerging and it sounds a lot like what most of us want: Density, mixed usages, reduced traffic and public transit, for instance, are all synonymous with good planning nowadays. On these fundamental matters it’s hard to find anyone who disagrees anymore. In that case every commentator can start writing about something else or risk redundancy. We won! It’s been a long time coming. In 1961 Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities , which she declared was “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” By that she meant the dull, bloated, single use, suburban-driven model that characterized the planning consensus up until recently. Now the experts are in near unison decrying the very same “great blight of dullness.” Just look at the cover of a recent Atlantic , which declared post-crash that “the ... (link)