Whyte could appreciate both critiques. But he was skeptical of the received answers of the time, whether they issued from another major city and landscape observer, Lewis Mumford, or emerged in the work of the era's great visionary architect, Le Corbusier. Whyte was no enemy of capitalism and the free market. Together, he believed, they made a terrible team. We tried, the charge goes, but the city is a hopeless tangle.
Medical analogies abound.
The city is diseased, cancerous, and beyond palliatives. The future is not to be sought in it, but out beyond, where we can start afresh. The possibility of working with a clean slate is what most excites planners and architects about new towns. Freed from the constraints of previous plans and buildings and people, the planners and architects can apply the whole range of new tools. With systems analysis, electronic data processing, game theory, and the like, it is hoped, a science of environmental design will be evolved and this will produce a far better kind of community than ever was possible before. . . .