[ReactiveJelly]

Maybe that's the only possible way. More than a few systems have failed from over-planning and under-iterating.

And they do say cities are the greatest invention of humankind

[RetroTechie]

Most successful systems are 1st & foremost practical. They do a job, and do that well enough to be carried forward.

Imho the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" (KISS) principle very much applies here.

[Barrin92]

It's even how we as biological systems work, there's plenty of evidence of old stuff and iterations still within every body and within every cell. This even was an explicit programming paradigm in the 60s and 70s, "extensible programming", for example driven by a lot of the designers of languages such as Smalltalk, aiming to enable systems that can grow not unlike living systems.

[dleeftink]

I'd say ruins are a precursor for cities to become beautiful--computation concerns similar strolling along age old paths and alleyways.