Planning Away the Low Road

This comment from Miguel on my post The Best Place There Is deserves more attention:

I was born, raised, and live in both Mexico and the US, and it always amazes me how much Americans love places like this. They are ALL OVER MEXICO… do you know why? Because they can afford to be. No frivolous lawsuits, no over-code enforcement and building regulations lol. These are the places you expect to see in places like California… yet they cannot exist because of unionized labor, workers rights, and building regulations. That’s what is great about Mexico. Liberals from the USA always come to Mexico and fall in love with… essentially what they’ve made impossible!

Lord knows that, more often than not, I throw my lot in with the heritage preservationists, city planners, rule-makers, but there’s great truth in what Miguel writes: we get the world we plan for, and the dearth of interesting spaces in Charlottetown belies the extent to which we’ve planned away Stewart Brand’s “low road”:

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”