The plans included the construction of two main boulevards, 120 meters (131 yards) wide and running cross-shaped through the city, lined with a number of gigantic buildings, halls, squares and triumphal arcs.

If Hitler had triumphed in the War, Berlin would have looked quite different. Of course, so would have the rest of the world.

I had participated in a design competition that asked for a reconceptualization of the unbuilt Governor’s Palace. We had integrated the adjoining plaza as a gathering place to represent the exuberance of Punjab and its jolly people. We wanted the re-use of the feudal structure to be as democratic as possible. But I bet this was looked down upon purely from the perspective of security. The city could not trust its own citizens.

Bruce Schneier writes on a similar theme about architecture and security. His examples are a stark reminder of the cautious nature of man protecting the people against a threat that might not even exist:

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody’s mind. So the architects designed a college without the open greens of traditional college campuses. It’s now 30 years later, but Syracuse University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.Concrete building barriers are an exception: They’re removable. They started appearing in Washington, D.C., in 1983, after the truck bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut. After 9/11, they were a sort of bizarre status symbol: They proved your building was important enough to deserve protection.

It is indeed sad to see security triumph architectural aesthetics or even functionality. Vulnerable countries like India and Israel have often lived with a constant threat and such security-first architecture is almost expected and taken for granted.

It is fine to juxtapose the old Greenwich Village against the gargantuan planning of the corrupt Robert Moses. Few other social scientists of her time grasped the idea of spontaneous order. But what to do if a city grows from one million to ten million people, as has happened many times in the Third World?

To be sure, favelas and shanties work far better than their reputations. Drug gangs aside, they embody many of the best qualities of Jacob’s analysis, or for that matter Hayek’s. But surely it is a problem when there is no piped water or reliable electricity. How can you get those services into new areas without some serious planning? You can call for private sector involvement but it is planning nonetheless and it probably will involve some use of eminent domain. Or how about new roads?

I believe he straddles an important middle-ground that has plagued much of planning literature. Planning, everyone agrees is important and necessary but they differ on how much planning or control is required. Libertarians argue that the market should be allowed to let a city organically grow according to the economic needs of the people. But then, we have a resulting city like Houston that you definitely wouldn’t pride living in. Complete top-down approach, like that empowered Le Corbusier gave rise to Chandigarh which I believe, failed to connect with the people and still remains a mystery even to the people who live there. Jacobs may have leaned a wee bit too much toward the left but her opposition to Moses, who built much of New York’s infrastructure, was well-intentioned. Moses’ creations may have helped New York be the city that is today but at the same time, social injustices cannot be overlooked in the name of progress. Equal representation to all sections of the society must remain planning’s overarching objective.

Times are much different from when Moses and Jacobs practices their professions and it may not be possible to adhere to simply one process of planning. Globalization and urban agglomeration has made Jacobs’ idyllic sense of a community redundant whereas the global melting pot of cultures and ethnicities in any metropolis worth its salt has refocused attention on social justice.

Is it time to develop a new theory for planning that focuses on changing times, social and economic, as well as keep an eye on sustainability? Or does one already exist that needs a little tweaking?

Her work and writings has greatly influenced my thinking and understanding of urban space and the way we interact with people in a community. If the title of this post sounds cryptic, one of her arguments was that eyes on the street make it safer for the people. Crime and anti-social behavior is less likely to occur if the windows of the nearby homes and buildings open out into the street [explains why dark alleys have acquired a reputation, eh?] She makes this argument for compact living and more community spaces. The New Urbanism movement emphasizes too much on form whereas it should emphasis more on social connections that make a city more livable than the other.