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the liberal dream.

micro manage for your immediate interest.

if only people with kids donate to the new proposed school construction, as the article used as a passing example, then nobody really is a city planner, as that assumes future vision...

As someone who is ostensibly a planner, I'll agree that these examples seem like more short-run tactical neighborhood improvements. And that's no bad thing! But, I think you're right that these platforms are yet to provide a venue for resolving the sticky problems of planning that

- require long-term coordination

- require cross jurisdictional cooperation

- have broad disagreement on the desired ends or means

- require the kind of funding / financing heretofore only available to / applied by governments

But, I think this is the right direction! I'd love to see plans themselves developed in a more open source / open science kind of way. In my experience, most plans are some mix of carefully wordsmithed rhetoric combined with insufficient analysis that could bear a lot more scrutiny--all packaged up into a crisp looking document produced in InDesign with lots of inspirational photos taken from the area. Why not, for example, start with a jupyter notebook in github, and let people fork / issue pull requests?