He preferred a landscaping fantasia of pine trees in his front yard, and he even built two mini-berms to accessorize it. But the truth is, the community cannot make a decent residential streetscape unless there is agreement, for instance, that all neighbors will respect the need for trees in the planting strip. Diversity is meaningless outside orders of unity, particularly where the human habitat is concerned. Diversity, for its own sake, is exactly what makes the standard American commercial strip such a ridiculous and tragic place. That is not the problem.
Nobody comes back from a trip to Italy complaining that the hill towns all looked the same.
The urbanism of Baron Haussmann's Paris is so rigorous that the casual observer could easily mistake the Blvd. St. Germaine for the Blvd. St. Michel, but as far as I can tell, no environmentalist ever came home from Paris complaining that the streets all looked too much the same. The problem with our common American daily environments is not that they are too uniform, but that they are of uniformly miserable quality. Uniform excellence, as in Paris and Tuscany, induces a different state of mind and produces quite a different result.