Lileks Words of Wisdom

He's been to Disneyland and that got him thinking about the repeated failure of planned communities. I've lived in some bad places, He writes:

And the worst of them all was a planned community, in fact: the brutal Cedar Square West hive-o-humans, a concrete nightmare based on the pack ‘em-and-stack-‘em theory of community. Twenty floors of humans and cockroaches with a community center off the lobby! Come for the urine-soaked stairwells, stay for the ping-pong table whose net was stolen 2 years ago and probably used to garrote a rival.

He concludes, rightly I think:

Perhaps Utopias don’t work because they’re so bloody earnest and sincere.

Read the whole thing here.