veen, there's a section on city planning you might find interesting.
They say Rotterdam was bombed twice, once by the Germans and once by architects. This story is pretty much exactly what I was taught in my first urban planning class, beat by beat in the context of the Netherlands. There's neighborhoods here that planners call 'stamp neighborhoods', since the blocks were designed once to hold the perfectly-calculated amount of households and then just copy-pasted again and again and again, like stamping your city. Like these nine blocks, or this entire part of Rotterdam. The good news is that we've moved on from this top-down scientific rationality, which is how my professors described it, towards understanding the diversity of cities and their people. The world is complex, so communication and collaboration between all the people involved is necessary to make better cities - not a city-sized eraser like Corbs wanted.
Oddly, it's the suburbs (in the US) that are built with the stamp -- you know (or maybe you don't, luckily), giant tract houses with two feet of sideyard between them, lots of pavement, no trees. The worst hell to live in. Think the end of A Wrinkle in Time, which is really mostly social commentary. In Austin, you can instantly tell if you're in a neighborhood built in the '60s or '70s because it conforms to the topography, kept its trees, and the houses vary. The cookie-cutter stuff came later. The campus, of course, is generally brutalist.