The planning profession keeps oscillating between being destructively radical and destructively conservative. The “urban renewal” disasters of the 1950s and 1960s led to eloquent repudiation by Jane Jacobs’s epochal The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), but their influence lives on in the bloom of homeless people on city streets in the 1980s—there were no “slum” hotels left. So the new suburban developments went in the opposite direction. Garreau defines master planning there as “that attribute of a development in which so many rigid controls are put in place, to defeat every
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