Beauty in my backyard

The problem with that worldview is that it's always the same look from the same perspective that is, the economic machine is an extractive system (top Your perspective ignores the fact that some of "us, the people" are actually benefiting from this economic machine/collective organization. In industrialized societies, it's been decades that even the people at the bottom of the social ladder have "more to lose than their chains". And no matter how morally responsible ex-colonizing nations are, it is a fact that newcomers have to be somewhat integrated economically and culturally and that no society knows how to do that at the scale of arrivals. It turns out reality is not as simple as our moral world is and it takes time and thankless work to figure out what's happening. Morality is somewhat well-equipped at handling relationships and at maybe detecting the economic/political systems failure modes but it is not well-equipped at solving societal issues.

The truth is that it is easy to attribute merit and blame but har to actually trying to make relevant change. Our vision of History is somewhat biased because we remember people who were responsible for positive change as people with the "right" position but it is often forgotten how much strategy, technical issues they've had to solve fort those to prevail :

https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Waging-Good-War-Thomas-Ricks/dp/1...?

The problem is that this equates two very different way of building houses, and lumps them together.

For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.

In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.

Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.

I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"

When it comes to the UK, I think this diagnosis that people lost trust that new buildings would beautify rather than uglify their towns and cities, is definitely a strong part of the picture.

But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.

Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.

Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.

I also wanted to address this -

> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.

Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.

> Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes

I'm not sure I took that away from this article so much as "Architects and planners need to stop building ugly-ass monstrosities so people might actually celebrate urban renewal again".

I don’t think this is true.

Opposition is not really related to aesthetics.

People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.