TheStar.com | Columnist | Let s find a better way to plan a city →
“[B]oth planning and the law are crude and clumsy ways to make critical decisions. They are systems that can turn even the most intelligent people into dupes and shills.
In the meantime, however, large numbers of professionals now depend for their prestige and livelihood on these antiquated and essentially barbaric processes.
Lawyers, as well as psychiatrists, doctors, accountants, land use planners, architects and engineers are the only real winners.
The rest of us are the losers.
No, we’re not all sentenced to jail for crimes we didn t commit, but the communities we inhabit are slowly but surely being destroyed by a planning regime that doesn t work.
Yet the essence of the urban condition is compromise. Regardless of whatever else the city may be, it represents shared space. It turns all of us into neighbours and, therefore, demands that we learn to coexist.”
