I dunno, I feel the opposite. Planned communities always feel soulless to me, artificial. I like cities that have grown in fits and starts, in ways their planners didn't anticipate or wouldn't have approved of. It's a reminder that cities are ultimately about the people who live in them more than any one person's grand design.
IMO, there is a lot more you can do when designing infrastructure from the ground up. Near me there is an underground mall connecting around 30 buildings. While limited, the advantage of separating foot traffic from road traffic is huge. It's all built down one street, but expand that in two directions and you can easily have a few hundred buildings within walking distance of each other. Which is not only efficient, but actually promotes walking around. No need to worry about heat or inclement weather. Add a subway for longer distance trips and cars become far more optional.
Baltimore has a raise sidewalk covering a few blocks which also provides significant benefits as it's a high foot traffic area. However as it's exposed to the elements and does not add space for shops. So, I suspect it's going to be more costly to maintain long term.
Other options: Moving sidewalks are unfortunately energy hogs and limited to fairly low speeds. But, I suspect some raised bike lanes separated from foot and road traffic could move a lot of people at fairly low costs. The advantage over bike lanes is safety and they don't reduce density. Which of course opens the door to other forms of personal rapid transit. The important bit IMO is even 20 MPH can cover a lot of ground if your not stuck in stop and go or deal with pedestrians.
I really don't think there's any place on earth that's not planned, to be quite honest. I think we're using the wrong word here.
If you look at a city like Paris for example, Haussmann's plan, in my opinion at least, has created an absolutely stunning and unique city. But within it, there's been a lot of room for organic development.
But if you look at a city like Detroit, you get the developer-dictated sprawl you mentioned. But that, too, is planned. If you create building permits for block after block after block of single-family detached home, you get detroit's urban sprawl where you'll figuratively die of hunger in the unfortunate case your car is out of fuel and you need to walk to the nearest mall haha.
Anyway, I think in general European cities have gotten it right quite often. Lots of open spaces, green spaces, make cities walkable, good public transportation, mix housing with light commercial areas, keep heavy industry outside of the city, mix housing catering to various socioeconomic classes, create a good amount of density so you don't get sprawl, but so you don't get overcrowding either, and focus (public) transport on connecting residential and office/commercial areas. You usually get a great quality of life, little polution, social cohesion, affordability, little social tension, and create an impression that it's unplanned and organic (i.e. don't use graph paper to model a city)
I agree, "planned" may not have been the right word for me to use, since most cities have had at least some degree of planning in their development.
I reached for that word because (in the modern-day US, anyway), a "planned community" is a very specific thing: a giant, car-centric tract of residential housing, with the developers making a nod towards the needs of real communities for things like grocery and other retail shops by plunking a shopping or strip mall in the middle. It's the Levittown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York) model, but with McMansions instead of the small Cape Cods and ranch houses (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/building.html) of the original post-WWII building era.
The sentiment I was trying to express was that the homogeneity of building everything at once made Songdo sound more like that than it did a city like, say, New York, which (while there have been master plans guiding development there too) can still feel diverse and lived-in.
In the USA, the only thing developers can get permission to build is awful sprawl. Single-use zoning with very large parking requirements in front of every building and large setback requirements to keep all uses father apart than walking distance and absurdly wide high speed roads separating everything is the rule and getting an exception is very difficult, time consuming, and expensive.
You could say that those rules are accidental instead of planned. Certainly when they were first mandated by the Roosevelt administration during the depression, the planners didn't envision the kind of soulless wasteland America is becoming. But those are the rules you need to make it easy to drive everywhere in a car. Changing them will require accepting that some places are nicer when you have to walk and that middle class people can bike or take transit sometimes.
By not changing those rules, we are planning for nasty sprawl everywhere. Parking requirements are often called the single biggest anti-market intervention in US development, [0] but there is a byzantine network of sprawl rules.
Before the dictatorial intensity of modern zoning, cities grew in a more organic fashion. Places like Tokyo and central Seoul (not the part in op) still do grow organically and do not have sprawl. They can be delightful places to live. San Francisco is very desirable for having grown before sprawl zoning as is Boston. You can't say Tokyo, Seoul, SF, or Boston are strictly unplanned but they grew under a set of rules much less distortive of market preferences. People love the less distorted cities and the prices of the limited quantity of walkable, organic real estate in America keeps shooting up because they can't make any more of it but more and more people love the healthy lifestyle it enables.
[0] The High Cost of Free Parking by D. Shoup http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf later expanded into a great long book which you should also read
You'll really need to be a lot more specific because stating there was no planning to a city like London or Amsterdam would be really myopic. Perhaps not on the level of Haussmann's plan, sure, but there's been quite a lot of planning in every city. Particularly because most cities have been severely damaged and then rebuilt according to a plan (e.g. London after the 1600s fire, but also after the second world war, both to rebuild bombed areas, but also as part of an expansion of the city where large parts were built completely after the late 1940s UK town and country planning acts, which is not dissimilar to the late 1910s act after the first world war.)
I think there's a huge continuum of "planning". It's true that even cities which have mostly evolved organically also have probably had various bits of planning applied to them here and there, and there's a big difference between that and a city where the majority of the city's layout was planned as a whole, and rigidly controlled over time... [E.g., Tokyo, which is hugely "organic" city, even now, but which also certainly has had parts of it planned, and continues to have some central direction to its development.]
I'm a fan of organically evolved cities, but planning isn't some sort of poison that ruins everything in any amount, and indeed it can be done in a way that really works well. Look at Edinburgh, where large parts of the central city are the result of several eras of large-scale urban planning (all centuries ago). It's one of the most beautiful and livable cities in the world.
I think one has to be much more wary of modern efforts at city planning, in part because the modern obsession with automobiles means that modern city plans are almost always oriented around them—and this is pretty much universally poison for a livable city.
