""I think that period offered a leadership that we're lacking now," says Mark Pasnik, codirector of pinkcomma and one of the exhibit's organizers." / / / As one who lived through the era of big urban ideas, I caution you not to glamorize the past, or try to define the city's future to your liking. / / / Starting n the 50's and even into the 70's, a combination of post-war hubris, Bel Geddeian visions, Robert Moses inspired audacity, modernists' dogma that Architecture could remake the world, and US urban designers' envy for the blank slates American bombers had given their European bretheren, fueled bulldozers that accomplished what war had not. With no regard for the residents, wrapped in gauzy images of a glorious future, they sterilized large sections of American cities, to the financial benefit of a few, and sacrificed urban life to the internal combustion engine. /// Today we no longer have the manic energy or money of that era, nor the egotistical self-rightiousness and utter disregard for poor and minorities, and that is a good thing, as the Chinese are now learning. / / / By all means create a visonary framework for future development, then let development take it's course, at all times fighting to preserve the human scale.

I think that Ontario Place was a much more successful design. What I'm seeing here looks like happy people imposed in Brutalist spaces, which in real life were sometimes poetic but mainly dreary.

Ontario Place? That bunch of artificial islands with a run-down amusement park on the fringe of Toronto? What's that got to do with large scale urban planning? More like a third rate Disneyworld than a city neighborhood.