This is truly great work. There were hundreds of places where the author could have taken short cuts, emerged with easy epiphanies. he avoided them all, and he's given city dwellers everywhere a really important text for refelecting on how planning gets done. And there is a wildly revealing moment when he's interviewing the landscape architect behind this mess--you hear the voice of undemocratic "expertise" ring out in all its unguarded clarity. A bravura piece of urban reporting and political thinking, jsut the right length.