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calcsam comments on Which Fields Are Underserved? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Consider Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, etc. These men combined methods which claimed to be scientific. Corbusier tried to maximize population density; Moses, to maximize road construction.
But they were working in very intricate, complicated systems and ignored the effects that maximizing their favorite metric would have on everything else. They dictated everything from the center and ignored local knowledge.
This is what we call dangerous knowledge.
The failure of these methods -- "the projects" housing inspired by Corbusier, Moses's neighborhood destruction, helped trigger -- as far as I understand -- the current focus on aesthetics and intuition. It's a reaction to that, a "risk-averse" strategy to picking the wrong metrics and trying to maximize/minimize them.
A parallel example might be Robert McNamara and the whiz kids turning into the Best and the Brightest in Vietnam.
Corbusier, for his part, was actually part of the fashion for science which gains speed in the 19th century. It's about the "aesthetic" of science more than actual science, like how science is depicted in a comic book (for example).
I don't really see a focus on aesthetics and intution as a "new" focus, or something that was turned to as a reaction to previous urban planning. I haven't read the previous works, but what seems to set Jacobs apart is that she didn't merely base her judgments on what was aesthetically pleasing - that she actually went out and did basic science, collecting observations and forming a hypothesis that explained them.
Did Le Corbusier really try to maximize density? Because he utterly failed. While the original post complains about how little Jacobs measured, it was a lot more than Le Corbusier.