ABSTRACT
The kind of city planning criticized by the writers Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander was different from the actual capitalist development of modern cities. The works of Jacobs and Alexander in the 1970s was brilliant and tremendously fresh. They modestly confined themselves to the question of city planning, but proved universally that the artificial design of a society necessarily fails and end with the opposite of what was intended. Their critiques of city planning seemed to entail the fundamental critique of social planning in general. This chapter focuses on the question of city planning, because it seemed to encapsulate the question of the architect as metaphor, from Plato's philosopher-king to Lenin's vanguard party. Plato is the first thinker who introduced architecture as metaphor to explain philosophy. Global urban development was based upon the modernist idea of city planning, which Jacobs and Alexander criticized: zoning and high-rise buildings and motorization. The deconstructive power of capitalism indicates to seek utopianism again.
