A number of libertarian blogs have picked up BeyondDC’s post showing before and after aerials of Southwest urban renewal and citing it as an example of why government city planning is inherently bad.

That’s a little like saying contemporary doctors are bad because once, long ago, tribal medicine men practiced voodoo and it didn’t work. Or it’s like saying international travel by contemporary airplane is impossible because the Wright brothers’ first plane only managed to fly a few yards. Simply put: Citing an obsolete example of something doesn’t make the contemporary version wrong.

There are lots of things wrong with contemporary planning (*cough* zoning), but the fact that planners made mistakes a half century ago isn’t one of them.