By getting planners out of some of the unnecessary minutiae of their jobs, they can, well, actually plan for things. Ensure that we have good street grids, land set aside for parks and schools that are harder to retrofit into a pure 'anything goes' system, and also try to do some planning to keep genuinely noxious uses away from where people live, rather than "keeping apartments away from the 'nice' neighborhoods".
Yes. I think the canonical fear that there would be nuclear power plants next to daycares is nonsense and that private developers acting in their own interests would manage to identify market demand, experiment in fulfilling that demand, and the result would be the creation from the ground up of best practices for creating vibrant communities - until market preferences shift. And when those preferences shift I think private developers would be far quicker to adapt than central planners.
I find it wild how much the west abhors eastern communist central planning and then adopts it for the very fabric of its communities.
https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines#desc
By getting planners out of some of the unnecessary minutiae of their jobs, they can, well, actually plan for things. Ensure that we have good street grids, land set aside for parks and schools that are harder to retrofit into a pure 'anything goes' system, and also try to do some planning to keep genuinely noxious uses away from where people live, rather than "keeping apartments away from the 'nice' neighborhoods".