[davidw]

I think some of the discussion in this book - written by a former planner - is pretty sensible around what we should be doing:

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".