11/11/2025
Design Arrogance and the Lesson of America
🧭 When we stop listening to the people who live in a place, even the best design ideas can go very wrong.
This story is from my first book, The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived — What’s Changed and How You Can Help. I’m resharing it here for readers of my newsletter, Future Here Now, because its lessons matter more than ever.
You can find the book wherever you buy books — and you can subscribe to the newsletter [here ➜ Future Here Now].
✏️ A Cautionary Tale from Green Bay
A few years ago, a prominent figure in the New Urbanist movement declared that public participation requirements make it too hard to create great design.
The “ignorant NIMBY rabble,” as they put it, kept getting in the way.
That mindset — that people are an obstacle rather than partners — reminded me of a story I first encountered early in my career as a public historian and preservation specialist.
🏗️ The Dream of Victor Gruen
In the 1950s, downtowns across America were panicking: traffic congestion, suburban malls, and a fear that the “center of town” might disappear.
In Green Bay, Wisconsin, a group of forward-thinking business leaders decided to act. They hired Victor Gruen, the architect-celebrity who had just designed the nation’s first enclosed shopping mall.
Malcolm Gladwell once described Gruen as “short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair.” More importantly, Gruen didn’t just design a building — he designed an archetype. His creation, the mall, reshaped American life.
Gruen’s advice to Green Bay was simple:
👉 separate cars from people,
👉 widen Main Street,
👉 and enclose downtown.
If the city would just be “unsentimental and practical,” all problems would be solved.
💸 The Price of Progress
Two decades and millions of dollars later, the Port Plaza Mall opened.
What it replaced were acres of demolished downtown buildings, hundreds of displaced residents, and dozens of small businesses pushed out to the suburbs.
And what did Green Bay get?
A windowless, struggling mall that lost money from the start — and was bulldozed again just a few years later.
Across the river, the old “skid row” neighborhood that no one had paid attention to quietly evolved into the most vibrant district in the region.
Progress, it seems, had other plans.
📉 When Vision Becomes Hubris
Gruen’s grand design didn’t fail because the community was “backward” or resistant. It failed because he — and those who hired him — didn’t listen.
They trusted the expert more than the locals.
They believed progress required erasing what existed.
They never asked: What if we’re wrong?
The result? A generation of lifeless downtowns across America — our own monuments to Design Arrogance.
🧠 The Real Lesson
We should have learned by now:
Grand visions can’t substitute for grounded wisdom.
The real experts on a place are often the people who live and work there. When they resist a project, it’s rarely out of ignorance — it’s because they know something essential about how that place actually lives and breathes.
Humility isn’t weakness. It’s the foundation of truly sustainable design.
As Gruen himself realized late in life, his vision had gone terribly wrong. He invented the shopping mall to make America more like Vienna — but instead, he made Vienna more like America.
That’s the heartbreak of hubris.
💬 Final Thought
If we want to build communities that last — socially, economically, and environmentally — we have to listen. Not just to data. Not just to design stars.
But to people.
The ones who will live with the consequences.
📘 Read more:
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived — What’s Changed and How You Can Help
📩 Subscribe: https://wiseeconomy.substack.com — stories and insights about how power, economics, and community are shifting.
🎤 Collaborate: Invite us to speak or lead a workshop on systems change, community resilience, and the future of local economies.
