An awful lot of the really big ones (on the scale of towns and cities) were bloody awful. Aesthetically pleasing on paper, but unliveable. Logical minds planning carefully separated zones and routes and so on in ways that looked nice on paper and created soulless cities with broken public spaces.<p>An excellent read on this is &quot;Seeing Like a State&quot;, by James Scott. The chapters on forestry and collectivised agriculture are similarly interesting.