Some days walking around in newly developed parts of big US cities, I'm reminded that city planners/developers/architects, despite their supposed agreement about the failures of modernism, largely failed to take to heart the critiques of modernism from Scully, Mumford, Jacobs.

Planners have largely adopted the view that a grid of streets is a good idea, and they've incorporated the concept of mixed uses into new districts. So new districts feature a grid and a mix of uses, both of which are good.

But we also get:
- Huge, monotonous buildings that are far wider than those in the pre-modern period
- Buildings that rise as a single mass to the 10th floor, with no breaks or recognition of human scale
- Massive streets to accommodate the massive buildings

The problem with these new districts isn't that there's something wrong with new or large buildings, it's that their scale and massing is depressing and hostile to the pedestrian. We are still building the modernism that we supposedly moved on from -- with different facades.

There are ways to address this problem: Smaller (less wide) streets, smaller blocks, required breaking-up of building massing. But for reasons that aren't clear to me, these concepts are rarely incorporated into new districts. A disappointment.

(If you're wondering what I was thinking about today specifically, it is the "Capital Crossing" project that's being built on a cap above I-395 in DC.)

(But to clarify, the same conditions apply to many new-development areas, like Boston's Seaport District or Kendall Square in Cambridge, neither of which are decked.)