Urban planning destroys cities

I know I'm going contra the prevailing wisdom here, but it seems to me that city planners and the entire urban planning cult have succeeded in totally fucking up what might have been a lot of fine cities, had they been allowed to grow organically. Instead, we turned things over to a new crew of university-educated experts. That was the fatal mistake. The highwater mark in the Canadian context was when U of T brought in planning guru Richard Florida. Here was a world class urban planning theorist deigning to bless us with his insights! Oh, he's had some great theories about how the new creative classes will blah blah blah, but the fact is Toronto's livability quotient has done nothing but go downhill since he arrived. I think what cities need to flourish is a little less planning. There are signs we may be shifting in that direction. Many jurisdictions are loosening zoning bylaws. You'll soon be able to put up a sixplex on a lot previously zoned as single family. Everybody except the immediate neighbours agrees that's a good thing. Here's another policy I'd like to see implemented. In the post-war period when suburbs took off, you had 900 sq ft homes built on 50' lots. Over the years, lots got smaller and houses got bigger. Now we're building 3000 sq ft Mcmansions on 30 foot lots. In between we built a lot of houses that are simply too large for young families and too expensive to buy. A four-bed four-bath Mcmansion from 1990 could relatively easily become four housing units. As an added bonus, because such a policy change would greatly reduce the capital required to become a landlord, entrepreneurs from marginalized communities would soon be joining the ranks of real estate millionaires! That fact should get the diveristy-equity-inclusion crowd behind this idea. After all, we're just recycling history. Once upon a time, prosperous merchants built large brick homes close to the commercial core of their towns. When the town grew too hectic the prosperous merchants moved to the countyside, and their city homes were subdivided into apartments. Look at the Kensington Market neighbourhood for example. That's repeated in cities all over the land. We've adapted to housing crises before, we'll handle them again. Just leave the urban planners out of the equation.