Sounds like they are ignoring Jane Jacobs. Her four rules for a flourishing city area: the area must serve more than one primary function, and preferably more than two; most blocks must be short; the district must involve mixed aged buildings; and there must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people.
Sounds a bit cargo-culty. Those four factors happen to apply to the vast majority of cities in the world, most of which aren't necessarily "flourishing".
And one of the places which least fits the bill is the very place they're trying to replicate: Silicon Valley, where the blocks are long, the population sparse, the buildings mostly from the last few decades, and the whole area ain't nothin' but high-tech.
Now I'd say that Silicon Valley succeeded despite its lousy geography rather than because of it (most people I know who work there hate it and commute from San Francisco) though there's one important exception: the sparse population means that big companies can build those huge campus-like HQs which you just couldn't do in a denser city.
Some people prefer urban. However, a lot of people don't. The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals.
Silicon Valley isn't a city. San Francisco is. I don't know whether Jacobs wanted to encourage such factors --- she turned city planning on its head with her book in 1960, and it was a data-driven book, while the orthodoxy at the time satisfied "The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals."
I'm not sure why "encourage" is in quotes. If you mean, "inspire the next generation of city planners and architects to design places that people want to actually live" you're right. But I'm reading a more dismissive tone and I'm not sure why.
Jacobs' work directly contributed to the decline of the urban superblock (that mainstay of 1960s urbanism and blight on 21st century cities) and a rebirth of the mixed use development. The later is especially popular in inner suburbs going through phases of new growth looking for an antidote to their original strip-mall and subdevelopment plans (usually lack of plans).
Those sound like proxies for measuring some other factors; who flourishes based on the range of ages of the surrounding buildings? Presumably that really measures some variation in the types of businesses nearby, or that there are some long term residents, or the area has some hook factor which keeps people investing over and over.
All of which they could design in or design around without having to have old buildings, say.
But it sounds like they are designing for the administration of the city, not for the end users. I wouldn't want to live there for a few revisions at least...
