Urban Legend: Can City Planning Shed Its Pseudoscientific Stigma?

In 1961 urbanist Jane Jacobs didn't pull any punches when she called city planning a pseudoscience. "Years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense," she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Fifty years later the field is still plagued by unscientific thought, according to urban theorist Stephen Marshall of University College London. In a recent paper in Urban Design International , Marshall restated Jacobs's observation that urban design theory is pseudoscientific and called for a more scientific framework for the field.