Cleveland, Ohio must be the favorite subject of urban planners of how not to plan a city. There appear to be a plethora of books on Cleveland alone. The book I am currently reading on the subject, Kenneth Kolson's Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design, had three chapters on three community projects and how they failed. First, the progressives at the turn of the century, who were attempting to make improvements to the urban environment, created a government quarter of municipal and federal buildings under the direction of the Group Plan. However, there was nothing for regular pedestrians to do, so the government quarter turned into a slum for bureaucrats and junkies. Second, Shaker Heights/Village, a planned community that successfully locked out diversity as well as an communal elan. Third, the Erieview projects under the direction of I. M. Pie that the author describes as a federal funded project of urban gentrification that has turned into "a howling wind tunnel." The author faults Pie's Le Courbusier-inspired designs that maximized living space through architecture and paid no attention to healthy street life (indeed, the author claims that Pie's design liberated architecture from the street, leaving the latter devoid of meaning). The author's main point in all of these is important: the designs were aesthetically pleasing when placed on paper and in models, but the perspectives that they employed--literally and figuratively from above--failed to take into account how pedestrians saw the city. As a result, these urban projects were uninviting to pedestrians, and they became wastelands. My question: why is everyone picking on Cleveland? Certainly downtown LA, especially after the Ticor takeovers/makeovers of the 1960s and 1970s, has become a wasteland itself.