>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>
>Andy F wrote:
>>Robert Moses's deliberately making arteries in NYC impassible to
>>busses
>
>-One of Bob Fitch's great contributions was his essay on the 1929 New
>-York plan from the Regional Plan Association. He showed that all the
>-expressways attributed to Moses were actually laid out in the RPA
>-scheme - auto-centered suburbanization, planned by real-estate
>-intellectuals. All these paeans to urban planning in the abstract
>-seem indifferent to its actual history in the US.
>
>So you want the whole world to be Houston-- no urban planning?
Where in fucking hell did you get that idea?
Because I think that eminent domain is often used not for the public good, whatever exactly that is, but rather to enrich developers at the expense of working class people and their neighborhoods, you want to paint me as some sort of libertarian or an apologist for nefarioius right-wing schemes. You've become a walking, or at least typing, embodiment of why it's so easy to sell the right-wing populist image of liberals as out-of-touch elitists. Everything you've said on this topic sounds like it was written from an altitude of 36,000 feet. You're refusing to look at the actual history of urban planning in the US over the last 75 or 80 years, which is all-too-often a cover for displacement and gentrification. Sometimes it works (where you get the gentrificaiton part), as in NYC. Sometimes it doesn't, as in New Haven and Detroit (where you just get the displacement). But it's not the high-minded public benefit pursuit you're painting it as.
Doug