Des Fitzgerald. Living city: why cities don't need to be green.

    Ireland as is Switzerland is a veritable preserve of the views, which are considered antediluvian by the standards of developed world. For instance, in the early 1900, in Europe there was a vogue to rank "races" according to intelligence, etc. Of course, Brits and Germans were on top, French and Italians -- in the middle, but the Irish and Finns -- Europeans which were "unable" to create their nation-states at the very bottom, Jews were considered incapable of education, Japanese were inherently lazy, and so on. 

    Currently, such bullshit can still be published in Ireland, or in Switzerland as "science", only instead of Irish and Finns, they are being replaced by the Russians. Similarly, Fitzgerald considers the main criteria of quality of the cities the approval of some self-styled "philosophers" and snobbish architects for the very wealthy. Livability of the city, for instance, planning for convenience of commuting to work, existence of public parks or optimization of infrastructure, he variably, and sometimes anachronistically calls "fascist": P. C. L'Enfant, the architect of Washington, or Baron Hausmann, or "communist". I would not call his outlook "reactionary", just bizarre.