Because Michael Sorkin's "The End(s) of Urban Design" from HDM 25 has been such an important part of my research, I found this exchange particularly interesting:

[William] SAUNDERS: [...] there is a mom-and-apple-pie set of principles that, rightly, no one takes exception to, things like mixed uses, pedestrian scale, banishing automobiles as much as possible, good public transportation, retail open to streets, street trees, etc. [...] Sorkin points out that all this offers a rather pathetic form of public life centered around comfortable hedonistic lifestyle mainly for shoppers enjoying their cappuccinos and their chance to buy Gap clothes, and if that's urbanism, we're screwed, because it doesn't have anything to do with political life or social integration.

[Margaret] CRAWFORD: Sorkin's attitude is typical among certain leftists who haven't examined real behavior in the city—there are now lots of paradoxes about what is public and what is private [...] The idea that only the raw city is authentic expresses a kind of Puritanism about pleasure: what people want in public space is pleasure.

[Rodolfo] MACHADO: Sorkin's position seems very '60s.

CRAWFORD: It's so '60s.

[Paul] GOLDBERGER: It is as retro as the New Urbanism.

CRAWFORD: [...] there are two kinds of public space: the agora, the very small public space of democratic interaction; and the cosmopolis, where difference is visible; and Sorkin is conflating the two, imagining that somehow a diverse public equals a public of democratic interaction. They're quite different, although they are not mutually exclusive. [...] In Central Square, The Gap is a social condenser that mixes publics under the sign of consumption.

SAUNDERS: I'll just say that if I'm in a city and my only option is to shop and not go to museums or anything like that, I want to go home.

(Farshid) MOUSSAVI: The Tate Modern sells more per second that the Selfridges department store in London.

from "Urban Design Now", same issue of HDM.