A Challenge to urban planners

Many people in the urban planning field are idealists continually striving for optimal designs. Sometimes this relentless pursuit of the ideal hinders wider adoption by cities, builders, and citizens of good planning principles. The result? We as Americans have some really great cities and living places, but 90% of what is still being built is ugly sprawl. So - how do we fix that? The solution is not to exclusively focus on refining good design priciples. Rather, we need to significantly increase the number of builders, contractors, city planners, planning commissions, citizens who understand, want, and build to good design practices and have aligned objectives.