Planning would be a great idea, if planning meant that you had an idea of what you wanted to happen, effected the changes that would make it happen, and then it happened. But as the dogs in the street know, there is no such planning. Instead there is the maelstrom of chaos and unintended consequences that goes by the name of 'smart growth'.
The way you write, it would seem as if this was an idea that had not been tested. It has been tested - to destruction. Smart growth was the foundation of the Urban Task Force report Towards an Urban Renaissance (1998) that was accepted as the basis of Britain's planning for the next ten years. I said at the time that it would lead to a massive shortfall in the number of homes built relative to housing need. The Mayor of London at that time, Ken Livingstone disagreed, and said that the building programme I proposed must never happen.
He got his way, and now everybody agrees that it was a disaster of epic proportions. For more than twenty years now, Britain has failed to build enough homes to prelace its ageing housing stock. At the current rate of replacement each house built today will have to stand for 1200 years - which of course will never happen. House prices in Britain stand at a quarter of a million pounds. Working people have been driven from the centre of London. Overcrowding is endemic. It wouid take another twenty years to resolve this problem, even if anyone knew how to do it.
And this is what is called 'smart growth'. But there is nothing smart about it, and it is not growth, it is regression. Idiotic shrinkage would be a more accurate description. You may disagree. It does not matter. When I pointed out this problem, more than a decade ago, nobody agreed with me. Today everybody knows that it is true.