Civic Design Fallacy

"Where civic design succeeds, it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organisation that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community." Denise Scott-Brown

This comment is so completely contrary to the laws of man and nature as to not even rise to the level of being wrong. The cenurbs across western civilzation are strewn with rotting civic corpses, victims of those kinds of planner experiments. The successes of top down municipal planning are rare and IMO almost entirely accidentally sustainable. The general rule is that a built environment lacking flexibility ends up fighting the last war.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are "artitects" not "architechs" nor "architects." That's not an insult (in this context at least) but an observation.