Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Video: Sandy Ikeda on The Unintended Consequences of “Smart Growth”

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I came across this video interview of economist Sandy Ikeda by the Mackinac Center. Sandy currently blogs at thinkmarkets and has contributed guest posts to Market Urbanism. I thought Sandy did a great job discussing many of the topics we cover in this site. Sandy is particularly insightful when … [Read more...]

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets

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The recent post, Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion generated some interest and fantastic comments.   I recommend reading Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty in its entirety.  It is elegant in its consistently radical application of principles.  It is available for free from the Mises … [Read more...]

Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…

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In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions.  His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism. A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about … [Read more...]

Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”?

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At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl.  Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences.  Unfortunately, voting options have … [Read more...]

Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion

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I’ve been meaning to address the public education system’s complex role in land use patterns, and found that Murray Rothbard does a better job in his 1973 manifesto, For a New Liberty than I ever could.  In summary, locally-funded public education is an engine of geographical segregation, which … [Read more...]

Stadtluft Macht Frei (city air makes one free)

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Thomas Schmidt wrote a great article for LewRockwell.com that covers a lot of urbanist ground, with some help from a broad selection of Jane Jacobs’ work.  Here’s a snippet: Though you might blame any number of obvious villains and historical processes for this, the name Ebenezer Howard would … [Read more...]

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