AT New English Review, Nikos Salingaros and Ramray Bhat argue that reductionism has drained the vitality from cities:

A city is a complex multilayered system, teeming with components, very much like a biological organism. Following the Second World War, architects and planners instituted a top-down approach to planning and constructing the city that reduced it to simplistic components (Salingaros, 2000). Complex urban systems were contracted and dismembered by separating distinct multiscale functions: residential, commercial, workplace, pedestrian transport, vehicular transport, green areas and parks, and manufacturing, as a result of the industrial mobilization for World-War II. All of these had earlier evolved together like the distinct and complementary functions inside an organism. Pre-war cities combined all their essential urban functions spatially in an “urban web” (Salingaros, 2005: Chapter 1). After the war, residences were separated from commercial areas and workplaces, pedestrian regions were separated from streets, and so on. This is called “monofunctional zoning”, an approach to planning widely held responsible for extinguishing vibrant urban life in our post-war cities.

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