Yikes! What is "top-down planning" code for?

Andres Duany is the "father of new urbanism" - a positive thread in planning for the last half century or so - and yet he sounds not only like a grumpy old man ("There's this generation who grew up in the suburbs, ...They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else") but his reflections on democracy in this piece are a little strained:

While democracy does most things well, I think we need to confront the fact that it does not make the best cities. And that the cities that were great were rather top-down. You know--Paris and Rome, the grid of Manhattan. What would those have been like if there hadn't been some top-down stuff? Every landowner would have done a separate little pod subdivision. That's one of the things that's naive about Americans--extremely naive, I find, as an outsider having lived in places that are possibly less democratic, like Spain. This idea that you have an individual right to do whatever you want with your land is very democratic, but the result is pretty questionable.