To give the most charitable view, with which i have a lot of sympathy, central planning is often very ineffective. Think of affordable tower blocks all pristine and new which fall to ruin and become hellish prisons for the worst off in society because the underlying issues aren't addressed. Think of how slow public works are compared to private ones. Think of the million youth centers that no one uses, half assed public parks, mps campaigning tirelessly to save a random shitty building from the seventies from destruction, think of every high street rejuvenation project and how much the high street is actually rejuvenated.

Settlements in their most original sense are emergent, houses go where people want to live, parks go somewhere with the best views, shops should be close to roads to facilitate transportation. These decisions are pragmatic and internalised rather than explicit plans, a collection of individual personal corporate and governmental desires. The result of this is, ideally, a community moulded by convenience and practically. The complex marching patterns of ants are nothing more than thousands of collective insects making individual choices, and yet the result is optimal.

For the reasons above, i struggle to envision centralised, especially government centralised, planning being any good. Maybe there is a supermarket a mathematically perfect distance from your house, but the shop is on a hill and getting stock delivered is an ass, and it's right next door to the fifteen minute away high school so no one wants to run the shop cos of all the schoolkids. And we need to have a gym within fifteen minutes as well but no one is interested in starting a franchise there or maybe there's just no interest among the existing community but maybe one day someone moves in each does want a gym, do we build one just for them or is there like a threshold?

I don't think the free market is absolute, but it provides a framework for the complex interplay of societal needs and wants to result in a settlement which generally, big picture, reflects what people want. I think a top down, planned community approach to this results in a lower resolution view with too much requirement for social and societal engineering.

And to give a drop of sympathy to the "THEY ARE GOING TO POLICE HOW FAR WE CAN GO" crowd, who are absolutely hyperbolic. Think about the current implementation of catchment zones for schools and gp's as way of top-down rationing access to location sensitive resources, my choice to shop three 15min blocks over if replicated en masse may cause congestion for the people in that block, and how would such a top down system deal with that?

Basically, it's a great idea when it emerges naturally or mostly naturally, but as a top down initiative is massively vulnerable to inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, questionable incentives, and market issues, especially when implemented by government and council bodies who already exhibit glaring failures in understanding what people want and need and how to implement.