The University of Chicago Press has published a “definitive” edition of F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty under the editorial guidance of long-time Hayek scholar Ronald Hamowy. Given my interest in urban issues, it’s a good time for me to focus on chapter 22, “Housing and Town Planning.” It … [Read more...]
Preservation At The Expense Of Liberty
“Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.” –Haruki Murakami I feel lucky to live in Brooklyn Heights. It’s been called New York City’s first suburb. It offers easy access to most parts of Manhattan, thanks to the convergence of several … [Read more...]
The Great Mind And Vision Of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006), one of the most important and influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century, died a few days shy of her ninetieth birthday. The intellectual legacy she left for social theorists is as significant as that of anyone else of her generation. She … [Read more...]
Donald Shoup Takes San Francisco
Every so often during his tenure as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg tried to push through congestion pricing, in which drivers would have to pay to use city streets in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. That’s a popular solution to chronic overcrowding but, like drinking coffee to try to … [Read more...]
The Invisible City
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a short, often wonderful but consistently enigmatic (at least to me) novel about an extended conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Marco tells the Khan a series of tales about fantastical cities he’s perhaps only imagined. I’ve always … [Read more...]
Markets As Cities
Why are a growing number of libertarians fascinated by cities and indeed pinning their hopes for a freer future on cities? Two examples of this just from recent Freeman issues are by Zachary Caceres on startup cities and the winner of the Thorpe-Freeman Blog Contest, Adam Millsap, responding to one … [Read more...]
Spillovers: Knowledge, Beer, and Technology
In my last article, I wrote about how an economically and culturally vital city is able, without central planning, to generate two things that are essential to the city’s success: diversity and cohesion. I argued that when lots of people who reflect a huge range of skills and tastes can live … [Read more...]
The Demand Curve For Sprawl Slopes Downward
Suburbs have been around for as long as there have been urbs – cities, that is – a fact Robert Bruegmann reminds us of in his excellent book Sprawl. And as sociologist Max Weber in The City and historian Henri Pirenne in Medieval Cities remind us, it’s often in the younger, freer suburbs rather … [Read more...]