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by spanhandler 2133 days ago
Everyone likes parks and plazas and the occasional wide boulevard, it's when there's a bunch of "green space" of indefinite purpose strewn about, and wide streets with big setbacks everywhere because they "look grand" and not to serve demonstrated human purpose. Utopian city designs and planned cities often suffer from both of those blights.

Like Brasilia:

http://tourplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/brasilia-cap...

https://brasiliaarch638.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/aerea200...

High-rises but tons of wasted space. If they'd just put in a normal allocation of space for parks & plazas and right-sized roads the whole city could be much smaller and everyone would be fairly close to the actual countryside, not just unpleasant strips of green between wide roads.

Once you start looking for it in concept-art type city plans, it's everywhere: way too much purposeless, empty space, mostly in the form of non-park green spaces and too-wide streets and sidewalks. And if you have all those problems, in a real city at least, then you need a ton more parking, because nothing's walkable and the buses are slow (because everything's so far apart), and that's even more wasted space.