David Sucher on the politics (or lack thereof) of urban design:

I can easily design a Wal-Mart which was designed as a very urban, “Main Street” building — and was in fact part of a main street — but which hewed to the same labor and purchasing policies it has today, whatever one thinks of those policies. And, btw, that’s a perfect example of the limits of new urbanism. For better or worse, a Wal-Mart built according to new urbanist principles would still be very much a Wal-Mart.)