Source: Independent Institute
by Matthew B Crawford
“Transformative urban planning has long been an ambition of the high-modernist mindset. Its goals are usually public health, efficiency, beauty and something more elusive—order. Some cities that have received the full treatment over the past two centuries are wonderful places to visit despite their controversial remakings; see Paris …. Others, like Brasilia and Chandigarh (both designed from the ground up by Le Corbusier), quickly became ghost towns, full of high-modernist buildings and plazas of impressive conceptual ambition through which the wind whistled forlornly, eventually to be repurposed by squatters or stripped of building materials for use in the surrounding shanty towns where urban life carries on in defiance of the master plan.” (11/21/25)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/11/21/smart-cities-will-kill-freedom/