No, I can’t resist another quote from A New Theory of Urban Design. This is on modern urban development, which does not have the features of organic, growing wholes:

First, although growth often is piecemeal, the piecemeal character does not contribute to a growing wholeness. It is merely piecemeal, and produces unrelated acts, which lead to chaos.

Second, the growth is not, in any deep sense, unpredictable. It tends, most often, to be controlled by conceptions, plans, maps and schemes. But these plans do not have the capacity to generate a growing wholeness. Instead they force an artificial, contrived kind of wholeness.

Third, planned development is also generally not coherent … not in a deep-felt sense. It is supposed to be. But if we ask ourselves whether the final product of current urban design projects actually is coherent in the real, deep sense that we know from traditional towns, then we must say no. The order is superficial, skin deep, only in the plan or in some contrived orderliness of the arrangements. There is no deep inner coherence, which can be felt in every doorway, every step, and every street.

And fourth, this modern planned development which we thing of as normal, certainly has NO power to evoke deep feeling. It can, at best, ask for some kind of admiration for “design.” But of deep feeling there is no word, not a tremor, not a possibility.

How true isn’t this of software and software projects as well?