Gary,
Though Le Corbusier’s theories suggest that the center of a great city should consist mainly of skyscrapers – exclusively for commercial use – he did say that the area occupied by these should be no greater than 5 percent. The remaining 95% should be parks with trees.

Also in the center there would be a train station, the “hub” of the city, and three-story buildings with “luxury shops, [...] restaurants and cafés.”

Pam,
you are right. Here is how Jane Jacobs in her The Death and Life of Great American Cities describes Le Corbusier's city:

[Le Corbusier] devised in the 1920’s a dream city which he called the Radiant City, composed not of the low buildings beloved of the Decentrists [supporters of the Garden City], but instead mainly of skyscrapers within a park. “Suppose we are entering the city by way of the Great Park,” Le Corbusier wrote. “Our fast car takes the special elevated motor track between the majestic skyscrapers [...]. The whole city is a Park.” In Le Corbusier’s vertical city the common run of mankind was to be housed at 1,200 inhabitants to the acre, a fantastically high city density indeed, but because of building up so high, 95 percent of the ground could remain open. The skyscrapers would occupy only 5 percent of the ground. The high-income people would be in lower, luxury housing around courts, with 85 percent of their ground left open. Here and there would be restaurants and theaters.

Gary,
another quote from Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities about the consequences of the utopian tradition in urban planning:

But look what we have built: low income projects that become worse centres of delinquency, vandalism and hopelessness than the slums they were built to replace; middle income housing which are true marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against the buoyancy and vitality of city life; luxury housing that mitigates its inanity with vapid vulgarity, expressways which eviscerate great cities. This is not rebuilding, this is the sacking of cities.

The utopian tradition would include Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow, which placed cities in the countryside, distancing populations from polluted and unsanitary town centres, as well as Le Corbusier’s cities of tomorrow.

Gary
there is also the romance of modernism with scientific organizational ideas. This romance went well beyond immediate economic considerations, leading to the formulation of an aesthetic based on the idea of order, on the promise of efficiency, and on technical virtuosity.

The modernists sought to merge aesthetic innovation with economic rationality. European modernism insisted on the aesthetic potential of efficiency, precision, simplicity, regularity, and functionality; on producing useful and beautiful objects; on designing buildings and artifacts that would look like machines and be used like machines; on infusing design and social life with order.

Pam,
some examples of Brutalism in Melbourne.