It never ceases to amaze me that the people who are in charge of “planning” cities usually harbor a secret mistrust if not outright hatred for the city. They explicitly craft policies to try and contain growth and return parts of the city to nature. They take some of the most attractive qualities of cities (urban core density, robust mixed economies) and try to regulate them away.
Why are city planners so often opposed to some of the very qualities that make cities great?
Fortunately, cities are mankind’s natural habitat and greatest invention, and they are stronger than anyone’s misguided attempts to distort their purpose.
“[Patrick Abercrombie] proposed that London become a “circular inland city” composed of four rings– the Inner Urban Ring, the Suburban Ring, the Green Belt Ring and the Outer Country Ring. It was a way of containing the “inner city,” as if it were some dangerous or threatening organism which could not be permitted to grow. On most maps it is painted black. It was also important to remove industry and people from this inner darkness as if the act of so doing would render it less dangerous. In order to expedite the migration of a million people another part of Abercrombie’s report suggested the development of new “satellite towns” in the Outer Country Ring. Eight of these were built, and prospered, but the effects upon London itself were not exactly as had been anticipated and planned. As any historian of London might have told the various urban boards, neither schemes nor regulations would be able to inhibit the city. It had been proposed to check its industrial and commercial growth, by sitting new industries in the “satellite towns,” but London’s commercial prosperity revived after war. The manufacture of cars, buses, trucks and aeroplanes rose to unprecedented levels; the Port of London handled record numbers of goods, and employed 30,000 men; the “office economy” had restored the City of London so that it experience a property boom. The population of the capital had dipped slightly, after the dispersal of many of its inhabitants to the suburbs and to the new towns, but the effect was mitigated by sudden and unexpectedly high fertility. Nothing could withstand the ability of the city to rejuvenate itself, and continue its growth.” -Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography, pp 739-740