History of bad design

I have a few old planning books. It is depressing to see how we are so often still failing to learn the same lessons. I wonder for example if anyone remembers the books by Ian Nairn (published in the 1950s) called "Outrage" and "Counter Attack" which described in trenchant terms the mess we were making at the time of the public environments in which we lived.

Nairn wasn't even the first. "England and the Octopus" by Clough Williams-Ellis (he of Portmeirion) was published in 1928 and in the language of the day said much the same thing.

In that book are two cartoons from Punch dating from 1919.

I'm most emphatically not saying we shouldn't be building - only that after all this time we still appear to be unable to do it right.