An issue I have with this essay is that it assumes that it's the absence of central planning which gives rise to unlivable and automobile dominated cities.
But if you look at old photos of European or American cities before the rise of the internal combustion engine, you typically see a completely unplanned street usage: bicycles, pedestrians, horse drawn vehicles, kids running amok, etc. all sharing the space in seeming anarchy.
It required massive central planning to replace this shared space with segregated streets with 90% of the space dedicated solely to motorised traffic. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to allow central planners to run huge new traffic arteries through the centers of cities. Land was "opened up" for suburban development through central planning and massive centrally planned road and motorway building.
I guess my point is that associating "central planning" with liveable patterns of development does not seem reasonable to me. Central planning can and has been used for good and for bad - it was used to destroy urban environments in favour of motorised vehicles in some places, just as it's been used to promote much more liveable development patterns in places like the Netherlands.
"Zoned in the USA" describes the history of zoning in Canada and the USA, which accords with your view. James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State" includes the example of razing neighborhoods (in Paris) as you describe.
You're confusing design, planning, and central planning.
Traffic arteries are not the result of central economic planning. They are the result of the free market dumping the externalities of cars.
At that point you have two choices. Either you ban the car, and interfere in the free market and "pick winners and losers", something Hayek wouldn't like, or you adapt the infrastructure to what people are asking for in order to reduce traffic fatalities and other externalities of car ownership.
Central planning would be saying - no, cars aren't working at scale, we will limit the production of cars.
In this case the government didn't do central planning. It didn't pick winners and losers. It went with what the free market decided.
Robert Moses, a planner, demolished and fractured thriving neighborhoods to build massive highways in New York City in his quest to see cars working at scale. Architects and planners of the time like Moses and Le Corbusier did not pay close attention to markets, they were focused on utopic designs and unrealistic beliefs of what humans would achieve in radically new spaces.
That is why we have legacy highways and sprawling public housing projects.
TLDR: Roads were built despite the market's desire for mass transit.
The first automobile suburb was Long Island. Created by Robert Moses. Copied by all. Money was stolen from public transit and spent on roads, stolen from urbans to pay for suburbs.
In fact, cars did not scale. The road capacity did not, could not, ever, accommodate the demand. Physically, logically, economically impossible.
There is literally 0 market desire for mass transit. Mass transit is not viable on the free market functionally. It doesn't mean we should not build it.
Before the first automobile suburb, cars were already in sufficient concentrations to require infrastructure to be taken away from other modes of transport and onto cars - the first example was in the 1910s, MUCH before Robert Moses designed any suburb - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term
This is simply an a-historical take on reality. Cars got infrastructure by being enough of a nuisance to force the government to build around them. And it started in the city, not in the suburbs. Not that suburbs are good, but it's important to get these things right.
Things can scale without scaling enough. Cars did scale, they just did so unsustainably. Since we're being pedantic anyways.
Methinks a pendant would have read the Pulitzer Prize winning book before commenting, rather than blythely dismissing one of the most influential books about city planning as "ahistorical".
But perhaps your dictionary has a different definition for "pendantic" than mine.
I don't really care about that. I have provided a source for the fact that cities attributed infrastructure to cars exclusively before the event you cited, and I have provided a source for the fact that this was done because cars would kill people otherwise.
Saying that the reason for cars dominating the urban landscape and replacing the "anarchy" that came before them as GP said it is something that happen 30 years after it becoming illegal to walk in the street and cars legally becoming the preffered denizen of the road is ahistorical. Unless you believe Robert Moses is the reason these laws were passed.
At the time, New York state was the center of the universe. Whatever happened in Albany became the template for federal policy. (Another example is the New Deal.)
Moses was the guy who figured out how to make it happen. His nickname was something like "Master of Albany". Laws are nothing without funding. Moses invented completely novel financial schemes, often bordering on fraud and theft. These innovations were then replicated nationwide. With little democratic oversight or even awareness.
Again, roads were allocated to cars at the ezclusion of pedestrians in the 1910s, and not in highways. Cars naturally exclude other modes of transportation by posing a deadly danger.
There's no amount of source dumping you can do to get around the concept of causality. Robert Moses is not the one who killed the pre-car street. Cars and their drivers did by posing a deadly threat to anyone there.
The person I was replying to didn't talk about highways. They talked about car-dependence and the death of the pedestrian-first street. That happened with car drivers killing people and scaring the rest into yielding the street, and government then formalizing that to avoid literal deaths. That is to say, the market decided that cars went first and fuck everyone else.
Highways were not the first roads where cars drove out people. The first roads where that happens were just city roads when cars started proliferating.
It's almost like the private, selfish choices of people can lead to negative outcomes for all of society.
At the price it would be to make and operate a transit system without taxes or eminent domain or enforced monopolies, or land value increase kickbacks, almost none of the people that need it would find it a compelling value proposition. And then as a result low ridership would lead to even higher per person price, which makes it even less feasible.
It's just not possible for the private sector to make a good transit system without most of the heavy lifting coming from the public sector. Public transit has to exist outside the market.
For example even in m city with a really efficient system, even with all of the infrastructure already built using government powers and mostly paid off, even if the price increase did not increase ridership, I would have to pay ~3x more for transit, which would make it unaffordable.
Isn't Japan a counterexample? While government was essential for establishing the initial feasibility and cultural proof of concept, private competitors grew so much more successful than JNR rail that 30 years ago they decided to privatize the entire rail system. Since then, there has been unabated upgrades and additions of lines and regular train car improvements. The only major inefficiencies and decline has been in remote extremely low ridership areas.
The trains are still pretty affordable, and everyone uses them.
Even the JR group in Japan does not build the lines themselves. The actual infrastructure is built by the JRTT, which is a state agency. It's complicated because JRTT owns many companies of the JR Group and is a shareholder in others so one may get the impression the JR group is building the infrastructure, which it's not.
The JR group itself is only profitable because the Japanese government took on the vast majority of the debt from actually building the infrastructure.
So no, the JR Group is not a counterexample. It's still unable to actually build infrastructure without government power despite having inherited so much of it, and it's not able to profitably pay off that infrastructure which is instead paid by the government.
Government overstepped to create large roads for cars, which create a problem of induced demand. Private can not use eminent domain and sieze property for roads.
As Dutch born but moved to US 10 years ago, this article sums up everything I don't like about The Netherlands. He speaks about all the positive notes but there are plenty of downsides to it as well.
The biggest one is that if you don't fit the Dutch mold, it feels like having an overbearing parent at your back at all times. If you do fit the Dutch mold, it is the greatest country to live in.
Some more negative aspects. There are limits to parking spots per home. There are neighborhoods were you can only have a single car per family. There are no more parking spots. Expecting visitors? Sorry.
The Dutch government prefers people to take public transportation which generally is excellent but they make owning a car expensive and complicated (like parking example above).
You need building licenses for almost any change to your home - outside or inside. You want to create an extra bathroom?Apply for a license. Want to remove a tree from your yard? Well good luck with that.
The Netherlands is one of the most beautifully urban-designed places in the world for sure but it comes at a price. Some people love it and some people do not.
This "The Dutch do X" kind of story is almost always taken way too extreme. Same as the main article, the author describes many things about the Netherlands which don't apply to that extreme in practice at all.
The country is tiny (3x smaller than the state of New York) but differences are huge by area. For example the "1 (or 1.5) car per house" thing you describe only applies to some neighborhoods in specific cities, people that live there choose to live with that but it's definitely not a country wide thing. As a counter example I live 20 minutes outside Amsterdam, can park both my cars on my own driveway plus more than 10 visitor spots less than 50m walk from my house.
As for the permission to build: That only applies to the outside of the house never the inside, so the bathroom example doesn't exist. And even on the outside it's not for small things like a dormer. The practical restrictions are not that different from what most HOAs in US suburbs put in their contracts. And if you live outside a city you don't have any of these restrictions, because there are no neighbors to be inconvenienced.
Of course this is not "Sorry, no can do" but a "sorry, they'll have to come by public transport, park their car at the edge of the city and do the last part by public transport/bicycle/foot, or park their car in one of the free spots that's available because some neighbours are away with their cars".
As a US-born immigrant to the Netherlands 10 years ago, I'll differ slightly. Bureaucracy here IS real, but I observe a relentless pragmatism among individuals. Rules are not, I've observed, sacred. The Dutch are inveterate jaywalkers, literally and figuratively.
Every Dutch (and American, to be fair) homeowner at some point will have to make decisions about what work to do by the book, and what gets done "zwart" (yes, "black" as in market. No permissions sought and Usually cash "under the table" too.) At least in my experience and observation in the Hague, anything non-structural within the building envelope is done this way by default.
Digression: the politics of migration here are far from settled and this is one implicated area. Dodging permits and taxes is often stereotyped here as behavior of migrants from the eastern EU working in bulding trades but my native-born Dutch contractor was surprised when I told him I wanted the finish work in our house done on the books with a factuur, taxes paid.
Even for things outside the building envelope, there are substantial gray areas where one could seek permission (and thus denial) but one need not.
Honestly the thing that rang most false to me in this article, though, is the bit about parallel parking competence. My experience is resolutely the opposite to the point of ridicule. After a decade I can count on two hands the number of successful parallel parking attempts I have observed (i.e. made by locals, not me) in The Hague requiring 3 or fewer moves. 7, specifically. I keep score because on my bike I am often obstructed by people attempting to park and it baffles me how people who do this so regularly can be so bad at it.
I'm a dutch native and can give some background on the "black money". Growing up in the 80s, it was everywhere, in every sector. You could work a factory job and in part be paid in untaxed money.
Now that society is a lot less cash based, this practice is very uncommon as it comes to wages in normal jobs. It still exists in exactly the type of work you describe: any type of contracting where a private individual (home owner) is the client. Cleaners and gardeners working for private individuals may also be entirely paid this way.
These last remaining pockets of untaxed money continue to exist as the cost of regulation is higher than the reward. For example, cleaners typically do it as a side job, and they'd simple stop cleaning altogether when taxed on their low income. So it's better to just tolerate it.
Further, black money is considered spending money. You can't really hoard it and buy a house with it. You'd have to explain to the IRS where this money comes from. So it's considered "extra" money, money to directly spend in the economy, so it flows back in any case.
It's not different in this respect, which was my point: the reason planning works (or doesn't) in NL isn't due to deeply ingrained orderly, rule-following cultural norms at the individual level relative to the US.
I think the central thrust of the article - which I agree with - is that what works in NL works because there is political buy-in from the voting public for meaningful restrictions on the activity of real-estate developers with specific, desired outcomes.
Do people in the center of big cities in the USA have multiple private parking spots right out front? (I genuinely don't know but I'll make an assumption.) Perhaps in smaller cities they might have made it a priority over the decades while the city grew, but in something like NYC I can't imagine they didn't run into practicality issues. Do people there not expect visitors ever? Of course they do. You hop on the metro, I assume at least. Same here, and if you live outside of a big city's center, you'll find it's not only free to park anywhere, it's actually annoyingly hard to do normal things without a car. I was in Limburg a few weeks ago for 8 days, alone without a driver's license to use said car parked out front (the thing expired, I didn't notice). Let me tell you I didn't see many places and family had to pick me up or I'd have had hours of public transport time for a 20 minute drive to their place.
Most cities in America are very car-focused, including metropolises like Los Angeles. San Francisco also needs cars, at least uber, given the downtown transit system is a joke for true commuting.
The only cities in the US with actual transit systems that can 100% replace cars without being super annoying / delayed are NYC (and larger commuting areas like Jersey City), Boston, and Chicago. I know people in Boston who have lived in the farther-out neighborhoods (Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, etc.) completely without cars and it is do-able.
Within those three cities, there is still a lot of parking, and if you need more dedicated space there are garages with reasonable monthly rates. My understanding in places like Amsterdam the parking / driving situation is vastly different.
Considering how rampant and meaningless HOAs are I am not really sure things are better here too. My co-worker here has been fighting a losing battle for the past year to get solar panels on his roof.
That's already much more restrictive than even inner-city rules in the Netherlands. Solar panels don't require permission, only bigger changes that affect neighbors do.
Except that the VVE thing in the Netherlands is only customary for apartment buildings (and then limited to only within the building) while in some places in the US the HOAs have grown to control neighbourhoods of detached housing.
This post off-base in all dimensions. The Heritage Foundation economic freedom index ranks the Netherlands ahead of the the United States.
Zoning and regional transportation planning are not the central planning to which Hayek is talking about. And one only has to look at the farmer protests of 2019-2020 to see the popular response when the government overreaches.
Additionally all of the dunks on the US are misguided. The Netherlands is a country of 18 million people, in one of the flattest countries in existence with >90% of the population in urban areas. “We love bikes.” Well, duh.
Additionally all of the dunks on the US are misguided. The Netherlands is a country of 18 million people, in one of the flattest countries in existence with >90% of the population in urban areas. “We love bikes.” Well, duh.
Don’t forget it’s much less scorching and/or humid in the summer than most of the US, and much warmer in the winter.
It gets nowhere near as hot or as cold as most of the US. It is like most northern European coastal countries...maybe negative temperatures in winter, maybe 29 degrees on the hottest day in summer...the only months where the weather is really different are July and late December/January. Weather is pretty much the same all year round apart from that (just to be clear, I live in a coastal area close to the Netherlands).
The non-coastal regions of the US are more like Eastern Europe where you can get 35 degrees in the summer and -20 in the winter.
Have you seen it for practically a month straight? 40 degrees is average high in Las Vegas from June to September, and it’s only getting below 30 degrees from November to March. In Houston, Atlanta, Miami or New Orleans, it’s above 30 from May to October, and it’s even worse than in Vegas, because these places are much more humid, making the heat less bearable, as sweating doesn’t really cool you off.
Seriously, climate in Netherlands is in no way comparable to most of US.
It totally is. In summer I go out on the bike for fun all the time. In winter? No way - essential trips only. And I'd say that's typical for all Dutch.
It is also a tax haven, its healthcare system is one of the closest to the US in Europe (to mention something that people in the US are constantly banging on about), and has succeeded by totally opening it's economy to world trade (Netherlands is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world, biggest trade surplus as a % of GDP in the developed world)...but, ofc, everything has to been seen through the reductive prism of socialism and capitalism that stopped being relevant decades ago (look at US housing, the only other mortgage market that is as socialist is Denmark, and it isn't as socialist as the US...these things aren't simple).
Let us not forget, the Netherlands practically invented financial capitalism in the 16th through 18th century. Apart from the well known markets and exchanges they invented the permanently capitalized enterprise with tradeable shares of ownership distinct from management duties. (And colonies in North and South America, Africa and Asia to boot.)
Netherlands practically invented financial capitalism in the 16th through 18th century
And even here, you find that the Dutch also instituted the first real central bank[0], which laissez faire folks would tell you lead to panics and recessions.
Tulipmania[1] happened about twenty years later, but I'm open to believing that was a coincidence.
Indeed, here are reasons why Keynesianism and Neo-Keynesianism seem to dominate "political economics": it satisfys the Politician's Syllogism of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this". Telling of government that interference, recapture, bad monetary policy is probably a large reason for a crash and that it must reduce interference is no good when all voters are running saying "do something".
Keynesianism and Neo-Keynesianism (assuming this includes Friedman/Monetarism) dominate because their theories/proposals are, usually, based in the world and institutions that exist. Austrian economics is mostly the economics of utopia, masked by an inexplicably pessimistic tone.
The newest keynesian variant, modern monetary theory, isn't a "modern" theory of money... it's a theory of modern money systems. These aren't based on gold coinage.
Austrian macro is centred around the idea that interest rates are prices. Some people have a desire to consume now. Others have a desire to consume later, interest rates are the price they negotiate. No second order effects. No money supply. No interest in where money comes from. No money, in fact. Money is just a trade good.
There were two must-do-somethings" that "killed" Austrian economics, outside of dissident goldbug circles: the great depression & WW2. Their answer to "how do we win the war?" was "we can't, not enough money." The same applied to "how do we rebuild europe & japan?"
Meanwhile, post war economists were aware of these theories. Yet, they often observed "non clearing markets" in the form of unemployment in places where Austrian economics reckons there shouldn't exist.
Problem is that you can dissolve the current state, but new one will always arise after a period of epic blood letting. It is like a business cycle it seems. From chaos to some sort of order and freedom from daily threat of brutal death, to crystallization into a monstrosity, to fall and repeat.
There are few example of states that lasted for some time without a regular civil war and mountains of corpses. US is one of them having only had one mountain of dead civil war in 2 hundred plus years. However it seems to approach crystallization state. Try opening a business in place like SF and NYC to see the final form of the monster. Nothing can be abolished and state just grows till the what was a necessity becomes a parasite.
There is quite a number of extant peoples who evince me otherwise. Mondragon corporation and Linux Foundation both serve as evidence against your position as well. You most probably don't have an example of a functioning society because you've misconstrued your definition of society to be exclusive to the design of states. But the stateless form of man is that of small networks of aligned people, and therein lies the check and balance. And I'd postulate given the wide proliferation of knowledge, the high literacy rate, the level of interdependence and so on of the modern era, that people are more able than ever to self-organize in a positive and stateless life to produce a far more egalitarian landscape and one with a greater deal of optionality to the participants therein.
And if I'm being frank, what I see peering over the modern landscape is that the state is little more than a puppet for corporate interests, protecting malefactors from retribution while allowing them in turn to exploit the trust of people that the system isn't stacked. More or less it's a dissolution of the rule of law that consolidates power into the state through that means, and producing what is more or less a completely unruly class which is allowed at length to exploit everyone.
I suppose you're arguing the Hegelian perspective, but I assert the apex of man or the geist, is precisely that which is described in anarchist utopian literature. It's also corroborated inexplicitly by Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" towards the end. Failing to assert position that leads us to continued systems of oppression and a constancy of ennui within the zeitgeist, and a zeitgeist itself which is quite probably unhealthy as it inherits inertia and in being resistant to change it is constantly misdirected which we see everywhere constantly.
> But the stateless form of man is that of small networks of aligned people, and therein lies the check and balance.
I don't think that will work, either. A company like Intel couldn't exist based on small networks. It requires massive scale.
Back in the 70's the car manufacturers British Leyland was handed over to the unions. They abolished management and made decisions collectively. In the end, they realised that that kind of system couldn't work, and brought in management.
Checks and balances may work to some extent. Power structures usually emerge. There's always going to be an elite class.
A great essay called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was written by Jo Freeman, a feminist no less.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
I urge everyone to read it. It will really shape your perspective.
It seems to me that pure anarchist societies are inherently fragile and that power structures will inevitably emerge.
If you like the state so much why don't you renounce your citizenship in whichever developed nation you currently reside eschew your money, and ride out life in China? Maybe India? Vietnam?
You literally said "abolish the state", of which there are only a few examples in this world (maybe only one) and they all suck. The empirical evidence for your deeply held belief that life is better without any centralized planning is non-existent, and actually even opposite to your stated beliefs.
You are totally right. They play by words. Never by facts. Capitalism is so bad that let us go rant about it day and night, live from it, and ignore all socialists paradises.
Listen... a lot of people. Hayek still has a following. Well regarded. Nobel Laureate.
Implement... different story. Actual skepticism is a conundrum... notoriously difficult to adhere to. The tables turn when you need to defend your price theory of business cycles... you need to claim to know things.
This pamphlet is as good an example as any. It claims knowledge of what lies down which path... in a way that sounds quite naive to a modern reader, no different than the peers he was chastising.
Austrians were as loud and involved as anyone in building institutions.
> Americans could never do this, he said. We would not trust the builder to make a building so watertight. We would not trust the window manufacturer. We would not trust the water authority to keep the water level perfectly constant. Our insurers would not insure this. Our families would not buy it. Our regulators would not permit it. Our builders would not attempt it.
As a Dutch person, it would be easy to feel a bit flattered and proud. But instead I'm gonna have to take the modest pill and call bullshit. Building is sort of my hobby, I've stripped (to the studs if it were American ;)) down and rebuilt my house in the past 4 years, and while doing so have watched endless youtube videos of builders, many american.
From my perspective there's only one thing in that paragraph that's correct, and that's that in the US you wouldn't trust the water authority to keep the water level. That's not even an American thing per se (although the US is infamous for aspiring to be independent from government), but mostly a Dutch thing. My house is 5 meter below sea level, a window being 6" above the water line is just not a big deal when you've got that in mind. It's not just I'm at risk of a moldy basement. If the government fucks up, everything would be under meters of water.
The U.S.'s has excellent building quality and whenever something is not up to snuff locally you just import from Germany. The U.S. is also not as homogenous as the tiny Netherlands are, you could have a cardboard sheathed house in Texas, or you could have a thick walled brownstone house in Chicago.
Also we don't have as many talented tradespeople. Our education system is geared towards getting people to work desk jobs, I think the U.S. system spreads the talent a little bit more evenly. In the past 30 years or so, we've mostly been building cookie cutter houses, the only thing you could say is we've been working on fancier cookie cutters.
As a fellow Dutchy I agree with all of this, and to add to it: We pay for water management, it's not free.
Probably unheard of in most other countries, but every building owner in the Netherlands pays what translates to Regional Water Authority tax. That money is used directly to fund the pumps and employees needed to keep the water at the right level. More accurate levels (not needed everywhere) obviously cost more to implement, so the cost varies by region.
Also, as an immigrant to NL, the first election I was eligible to vote in was for my local water authority - because they predate the Netherlands as a state by hundreds of years so the only criterion for voting rights is residency. Fascinating stuff, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
Well put and proviso[d]. I cannot quote the page, but Hayak in Road to Serfdom himself endorses government handling of [health insurance or care]. "Many people don't know their own scriptures."
The author touches upon the housing crisis, and it's connection to mechanisms for urban planning.
To me it's a moot point: it doesn't matter if there's central planning or rule-based federal coordination or whatever. if you have toxic (foreign) capital using housing as investment objects, that'll drive up the price for everyone and create an affordability crisis.
True, but that's not the main factor driving up prices in the Netherlands.
At its basis, its the scarcity of land versus the ever growing demand. The current outlook is that an additional 1 million homes have to be built before 2030.
This mismatch between supply and demand has been here since forever. As such, prizes rise as far as the maximum affordability stretches.
For example, the transition from single income families to double income families has resulted in prices skyrocketing. More generous loan conditions lead to higher prices.
The government may then conclude that young people are priced out of the market, and lower property taxes. This extra room is then immediately used by the market to rise prices even further.
To put some numbers on this: we now crossed the average home price of 400K EUR, or 476.000$. For a young couple both having median salaries, they can't afford it. They'll need a significant cash donation from parents.
If they're lucky to have that, they still need to outbid other buyers by some 30K at least.
And the most bitter thing is that if they overcome all that, they still have a shit house. Smallish, in a busy street, maybe even just a row house, hugging the neighbors.
Housing is only the kind of attractive investment vehicle you describe in an environment where the price is artificially inflated by constrained supply from zoning and other regulations.
I promise you, if the price wasn't rising so rapidly and reliably, investors would find other places to park their capital.
Build housing to meet demand and the investors will go elsewhere.
Not Just Bikes talks about zoning in the US vs Dutch cities in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ. My impression was that the US has more restrictive regulations on what can be built.
An interesting parallel: the early days of the Internet assumed universal competence in a way like this piece describes. Postel's law says "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Relying on competence didn't last long though.
The internet has essentially no regulation. It's firewalls that protect against those who are "liberal" in what they send and voracious in what they accept.
There's some planning, but it's not centralized except in the large-scale walled gardens like mobile service providers and the big cloud providers.
"Several caveats are in order. Hayek did not predict that planning a single aspect of the national economy would lead to totalitarianism. He even offers ‘modern towns’ as an area where some planning is necessary"
Sort of renders the whole article unnecessary to me.
The author immediately contrasts the US, which itself is planned. Pretty silly if you ask me. I don't think there's a nation in the world that actually applies the liberal capitalist mode as Hayek wishes it to be applied. I would say because of the perception that America is the laissez-faire model, the culture of the US allows it to be further perverted while still maintaining the sheen of its laurels as a liberal state.
But if you look at old photos of European or American cities before the rise of the internal combustion engine, you typically see a completely unplanned street usage: bicycles, pedestrians, horse drawn vehicles, kids running amok, etc. all sharing the space in seeming anarchy.
It required massive central planning to replace this shared space with segregated streets with 90% of the space dedicated solely to motorised traffic. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to allow central planners to run huge new traffic arteries through the centers of cities. Land was "opened up" for suburban development through central planning and massive centrally planned road and motorway building.
I guess my point is that associating "central planning" with liveable patterns of development does not seem reasonable to me. Central planning can and has been used for good and for bad - it was used to destroy urban environments in favour of motorised vehicles in some places, just as it's been used to promote much more liveable development patterns in places like the Netherlands.