Excellent article about the push to “reinvent Paris” by Steven W. Semes in The New Criterion.
Excerpt:
So what is driving this push for tall towers in a low-rise city that is universally admired as the outstanding model of what a city can be? Why this “explicit repudiation of previously successful typologies,” as the CEU report describes it? The answer lies in contemporary architectural philosophy and its demand that buildings and cities be “of their time”—that is, conform to the aesthetic fashions of the moment—whatever the consequences for the character of the place or the quality of life of the citizens. This claim presupposes that “our time” is determined by historical forces—the Zeitgeist—that cannot be denied or reversed except at the risk of being bypassed by “history.”
Reading the full article below.
Preserving the city of tomorrow by Steven W. Semes | The New Criterion
Planning Naked | December 2015
Consultation is an activity (a means to an end) and not an accomplishment in itself. Personally, I’m sick of APA members citing all manner of acronym-ed organizations they have consulted as if this was an accomplishment in itself. It is not. Poor Richard: It isn’t the quantity of the acronyms that matter but the quality of their (letter) characters. APA members need to be careful about flying to something shiny (AARP’s Livability Index, e.g. Won’t someone please think of the old people?!?!) and applying it without thought before understanding its underlying assumptions. Count me suspicious. Based on experience, 
I can’t really comment with authority on the validity of Ewing’s arguments since I have not read the submitted paper in question. Of course, Ewing is correct that the larger the city, the more you have of everything including crime. The aggregated population v. crime correlation is interesting at an abstract level (and should be totally expected) but not very useful for planning policy. For that, you need the sensitive street-by-street and block-by-block modeling techniques of the urban network such as space syntax. In this way, you can demonstrate the usefulness of such correlations between population, crime, location/access, and spatial vulnerability and potential proposed design changes to address the problem. There’s a lot of good research on that front. However, what is refreshing about Ewing’s article is the transparency. It is an excellent attempt to ‘unveil’ the scientific process at work. In this sense, it is very valuable. In fact, Ewing’s article makes me wonder whether there is some inherent value in all referred publications printing short summaries by referees for all rejected papers so that the entire scientific, urban planning community can benefit from seeing the process at work. Something worth thinking about as this could be ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ type of strategy.
About Walter Gropius
The personal revelations in The Planner are hardly surprising (people are not always as they appear) or earth-shattering (people are stupid and need to be told what to do, i.e. what one might expect from someone choosing town planning as a profession). This is especially true since it’s readily apparent this is the worldview James already holds at the start of the story, so acute self-awareness is the only lesson he learns on this journey. However, it is the atmospheric description of the social mores of Londoners (including lingering remnants of the class system) and the locales/neighborhoods of London itself where Campbell’s The Planner really shines. This includes all-too-familiar witty commentaries on the dreariness and inherently self-defeating proposition of the town planning profession itself in the absence of naked tyranny. Some of it is very cynical (e.g. everything is branding). You may not be entirely satisfied where The Planner ends up but you’ll enjoy the journey getting there, which so often describes what the city is really all about (3 1/2 stars out of 5).