The housing crisis

For 21st century urbanists, the hardest thing to remember about cities in 1950 is how bad the housing stock was. Lowe hardly mentions it because it’s the one thing every reader knew: old housing was awful. One New Haven resident complains about rehabilitation because his cold-water flat costs only $50 a month (equivalent to about $500 in 2024). To find conditions remarkable, she has to go to the worst streets of a Black ghetto:

Mary White, her husband and seven children were shoe-horned into a two-bedroom alley house that had no heat, electricity or hot water. They shared a backyard privy and faucet with neighbors

p. 215 (third printing, a Feb. 1968 hardcover)

Or to Pittsburgh:

Street and office lights used to burn all day when rivers vapors rose and held the region’s soft coal smoke in suspension over the city, casting a midnight gloom of smog throughout the day. Smog would turn office workers’ collars gray by noon; coughing and colds were an unhealthy commonplace in Pittsburgh. Even in the suburbs, housewives had to wash curtains weekly to cleanse them of soot. Airline pilots had a particular dread of landing at the Pittsburgh field with its “ceiling of black ink.”

p. 112

To me, and other 21st century skeptics, she would surely say what she says of Pittsburgh: “One needed to know the city as it had been to fully appreciate the extent of the change.” The steelman (or better, steelcity) case for urban renewal might be that it only looks like the worst villain around because it obliterated greater monsters.

What is urban renewal?

This was urban renewal. The enactment of urban renewal [in 1954] as an expansion of Title I, coming so hard on the heels of the scarcely tried redevelopment program, caused even greater public confusion. Most people used the terms interchangeably, an error…

p. 34

What is urban renewal? It is a bundle of powers and funds that afford cities a uniquely versatile tool for bringing about many different kinds of planned changes and improvements in their blighted areas and for carrying out comprehensive development goals. While it is difficult enough to bring about these changes with renewal, such improvements would generally be impossible without it.

p. 560

Lowe opens her book with a narrow, technical understanding of the phrase “urban renewal”, and closes it with a capacious one. But the several case studies that compose most of the book’s considerable girth focus principally on the replacement of slum housing and the rebuilding of downtowns on modernist lines. Her final case, New Haven, is a single 150-page chapter that communicates the impossible weight of the task. Heroic mayor Richard C. Lee and his lieutenant Ed Logue threw everything at his city’s problems – a downtown highway, code enforcement, extensive residential rehabilitation, school investments, community programming. In Lowe’s judgment, New Haven is the true standout of the era. But she still worries that it’s unsustainable:

Will someone keep New Haven moving when Lee is no longer Mayor? Or will the city ride along on recent improvements until it sinks once more into decay…?

p. 546

Half a century on, Wikipedia has a short article about Mayor Lee. The pitiful section on his legacy notes that the downtown highway he built – the Oak Street Connector – is now named the Richard C. Lee Highway. But highways are a sidenote in Lowe’s narrative – there’s much more about the various approaches to replacing slum housing.

To eliminate this omnipresent evil

With the newly liberal Congress that was elected in 1936 and the Supreme Court’s broadened definition, in 1937, of the federal responsibility for the public welfare, the way appeared clear and the purpose justified for using federally collected income taxes to help financially disabled cities to eliminate this omnipresent evil.

p. 26

The new Congress responded to the consensus that cities needed “positive powers – especially eminent domain and public funds – to acquire and demolish slum buildings, as was being done in some European countries.” It passed the Housing Act of 1937, which established power and purse for demolishing slums and building public housing.

But this approach was too expensive. So Alvin Hansen and Guy Greer filled in the gap with the idea of “write-down” financing:

1. With federal funding, a city buys slum dwellings via eminent domain , relocates the residents, and clears the land.
2. The city offers the land for sale below market rate (the “write-down”)
3. Developers create new, better, less-dense housing on the site

The willful disregard of economic information inherent in this formula is stunning. Not only were the new buildings economically inferior to the old; they were economically inferior to vacant land at market rates. The urban economy was screaming its need for density, but planners infected with the Howard–Corbusier mindset wear deaf to its calls.

Making Title I Work

Hansen and Greer’s write-down became Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, although urban renewal work did not start in most cities until the Housing Act of 1954 made more funding available. One city – nay, one man – dominates the history of Title I.

[Robert] Moses created in New York the biggest Title I program in the country – one with more results by 1960 than all other cities combined.

p. 48

Moses already had experience with redevelopment; his 1949 Stuyvesant Town was a popular success (although “planners and architectural critics” condemned its high density) on a similar model.

But the greater reason New York got so much done so fast is that Moses rewrote the Hansen-Greer formula, daring Washington to withhold funding. The New York method was more efficient:

1. A developer tells Robert Moses which piece of land he wants.
2. Robert Moses buys it using eminent domain and sells it – uncleared and for much less – to the developer (the “write-down”).
3. The developer milks the slum for a while, relocates the residents (maybe), and builds new, less-dense housing.

In 1957, federal administrator Albert Cole threatened publicly “to cut New York off from all federal housing funds”; Moses called his bluff in days. (p 91).

Lowe’s 50-page chapter on Moses is of unique interest because it predates Robert Caro’s The Power Broker by six years. But her biography and evaluation of the man are largely the same. In light of 2024’s re-appreciation of Moses and present-day concerns with finding people who can Get Things Done, her chapter’s conclusion (headed Men to Run Programs) is prescient:

Can a city today attract the talent needed to meet the demands of the new programs? Mediocrity at the technical-managerial level and lack of effective leadership at the top are major urban problems of today.

p. 109

Gut the heart

What New Haven intended to do with federal aid under the Housing Act was to virtually gut the heart of its downtown – removing the crazy quilt of “taxpayers,” cobblers’ shops, gin mills and hundred-year-old half-empty lofts and unattractive buildings.

p. 432

Along with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Lowe praises New Haven for having the boldness to reimagine its central business district (“A DARING CONCEPT”). But the thirty-page tale is one of debilitatingly slow fits and starts: finances are promised and lost, offers are made and retracted. In the end, even upgrading a slummy center into high-end office and hotel space cannot pencil out:

That New Haven’s downtown redevelopment actually went through seems to be a commentary on Roger Stevens’ unusual character… [If] Stevens had been a conventional developer or an ordinary man, he would surely have walked away from the project long ago (as his close advisors had counseled). Even with redevelopment aid, the project was not a market place transaction and could not be done through conventional financing mechanisms…

Where special financial reserves or guarantees were available, things got built.

p. 463

The more hopeful signs

Among the many virtues of extemporaneous reading is the chance to view the past as future. Lowe could hardly have picked a worse time to offer predictions about the future of cities. Just two months after my volume was printed, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination lit the powder keg that 1960s urbanists had only half-acknowledged.

But for our purposes, her timing is ideal. She tries to see a hopeful future, with urban renewal dogging the heels of the spreading slums and abating their evils with clean, public or affordable housing. But even in 1967, doubts have crept in. She worried about the lack of talent and commitment among mayors and staff. “Urban renewal”, tightly defined in the 1950s, has opened out to encompass almost any urban policy.

There are only inklings, glimmers of the post-1970 urban crisis. She writes about “juvenile delinquency”, not “crime.” Drugs barely appear; firearms not at all. She has no idea that landlords will soon set the match to their own buildings. In the strangest passage of the book, she sees the colors of the new and terrible dawn and praises it as hope:

Many landlords found it cheaper to vacate a building than to continue operating a slum… The boarded-up houses, and the growing vacancy rate in these neighborhoods (almost double [Philadelphia’s] average of 6 per cent for rental housing) were among the more hopeful signs in the blighted inner city. The impressive improvement in housing revealed by the 1960 census could be attributed in part to this “slum cleansing operation.” When the gray areas are cleared, as called for by the comprehensive plan, it is hoped that the costs, both in human and site acquisition terms, would be greatly reduced.

p. 360

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Jane Jacobs wasn’t optimistic about the future of civilisation. ‘We show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age,’ she declares in Dark Age Ahead, her final book published in 2004.  She evidences a breakdown in family and civic life, universities which focus more on credentialling than on actually imbuing knowledge in its participants, broken feedback mechanisms in government and business, and the abandonment of science in favour of ‘pseudo-scientific’ methods. Jacobs’ prose is, as always, rich, convincing and successful in making the reader see the importance of her claims. Yet the argument that we are spiralling into a new Dark Age, similar to that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, is not quite complete and I remain unconvinced that the areas she identified point towards collapse as opposed to merely things we could, and should, work to improve.

Let us start with the idea that families are ‘rigged to fail,’ as she puts it in chapter two. Jacobs, urbanist at heart, cites ‘inhumanely long car commutes’ stemming from the disbanding of urban transit systems, rising housing costs, and a breakdown in ‘community resources’ – the result of increasingly low-dense forms of urban development – as a significant reason why families are now set up for failure. She suggests our days are filled with increasingly vacuous activities, leading to the rise of ‘sitcom families’ which ‘can and do fill isolated hours’ at the expense of ‘live friends.’ That phenomenon has now been replaced by the ‘smartphone family’ where time spent on TikTok, and consuming other forms of digital media have supplanted the ‘sitcom’ family of the past. There has been significant literature on the detrimental effects of digital technologies to our physical and mental health, not least in Jonathan Haidt’s most recent book, The Anxious Generation. A similar picture is painted by Timothy Carney in his book Alienated America, where drawing on both his travels throughout the United States and on significant empirical data, Carney shows how significant parts of the United States have witnessed a complete breakdown in community and civic life over the past several decades. And yet – it is not clear that all of this points to a catastrophic ‘decline’ in civilisation as Jacobs puts it. We are fortunate to live in a country where there continue to be dynamic pockets of civic and social engagement. One might look at New York City, the suburbs of Washington D.C., or even the communities of Upstate New York, which I was recently fortunate enough to visit during a friend’s wedding, to see that there continue to be exceptions. This should lead to hope and optimism, for it suggests that whilst there are very real problems, so too do we have the tools to solve them and areas from which to draw inspiration. We could, and should, work to ensure our cities permit mobility, create the dense, lively and liveable neighbourhoods so brilliantly described by Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and encourage civic life by creating spaces instrumental to these activities. Yet so too should we recognise that different patterns for this exist, including in suburbs like Arlington and beyond. That diversity does not mean we are doomed for failure – quite the opposite as it can be seen as a form of experimentation and pluralism of values.

Now let us turn to the idea that our universities focus primarily on ‘credentialing’ rather than ‘educating’ – that higher education is now pursued primarily as a status symbol as opposed to for the inherent value it imparts to its participants. As a rising senior at Columbia University, one of these elite institutions, anecdotal evidence may be relevant here: there is definitely a pressure to excel in one’s GPA and secure the best grades possible, even to the detriment of actually learning. I have observed, amongst friends and coursemates, a tendency to pick classes that are easier and where teachers grade more nicely purely because of how it will look when applying to grad school and other professional endeavours. This is, in part, the price of a move towards meritocracy where individuals are (in theory) assessed on talent rather than on their connections or class and which therefore requires ever-more standardised measurements of individual success. Yet at the same time, coming to the United States has revealed that there exists a flourishing realm of liberal arts colleges and institutions that aim to go beyond pure credentialling and that do value education for its own sake. Hillsdale, Amherst and Middlebury are excellent examples of this. The pressure to attend elite schools goes beyond the status; these places are genuinely filled with some of the smartest and brightest people I have met, both from a faculty and student perspective. Jacobs is right to warn about the danger of higher education being sold to students as a ticket to some ‘elite’ strata of society, particularly given the significant expense and debt that students incur. And indeed university is not the right path for everyone, research has shown that other factors make a lot more difference to one’s professional success. Whilst Jacobs’ warnings are therefore valid, the issue is less acute in the United States where there is a significant financial reason to select a major and school that will impart actual knowledge and more of a problem in the United Kingdom and in Europe where subsidised higher education does mean that without a college degree, one will face significant difficulties in securing a position afterwards.

In the remaining portions of Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs identifies several other areas in very real need of reform, from the breakdown in self-policing of business and government to the abandonment of the scientific technique in areas like ‘traffic management.’ Her examples are vivid and teach the reader something, but they again fail to point to a wholesale breakdown in society as it is today. Most significant, however, is Jacobs’ analysis of the ‘dysfunctional’ financial arrangements of local and national governments which expand on Cities and the Wealth of Nations. National governments, in their current form, have a set of incentives at cross-purposes with how economies actually grow. By funnelling money away from cities and into ‘dead-end’ economic causes – in effect dispensing largesse – governments detract from the ability of individuals and firms within those cities to reinvest, innovate and find ever-more ingenious ways of ‘adding new work to old.’ Welfare, subsidies, and redistribution cannot drive a civilisation’s success. Only innovation and progress can, and if current trends persist, we may spiral into decline.

Where Dark Age Ahead excels in its analysis of the historical and theoretical concept of Dark Ages. The book ought to be read more for its historical analysis and its applicability to political economy and economics, than for its analysis of the contemporary issues identified, for as important as these are, more recent and accurate analyses can be found in Jacobs’ other books and those of other scholars. This book underscores the importance of not taking our institutions for granted, of promoting entrepreneurship and innovation so as to move ahead, and of constantly revisiting the Great Thinkers from the past.

In conclusion, Dark Age Ahead contains some real golden nuggets and makes for a compelling read for those wanting to understand the historical dynamics of dark ages and some of the dangers we currently face. Yet for the reader unaccustomed to the work of Jane Jacobs, I would instead suggest reading The Economy of Cities, which better urges one to rethink where growth happens and why cities are the driving force of civilisation.

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Continuing this series of book reviews on Jane Jacobs’ works, I now turn to Cities and the Wealth of Nations. But there is already a fantastic piece on the Market Urbanism website, by Matthew Robare, who reviews this book and outlines what Jacobs overlooks in her analysis. So, this piece takes a slightly different angle: inspired by (but not limited to) Jacobs’ ideas, it aims to highlight what mayors, governors and urban policymakers could do differently if they are serious about developing their cities into economic powerhouses. Here are some of the most important takeaways from this book and also how they can be expanded upon.

(1) Focus on cultivating import-replacement

The economies of cities do not grow out of nothing. They grow by adding productive new forms of work to old ones, by innovating, and by being cultivators of new ideas and techniques. This process of cataclysmic growth – that Jane Jacobs describes as ‘import-replacement – occurs when a city takes its existing imports and builds upon them, either improving its production through lowering costs, increasing quality, or innovating. The market for these additional goods can either be found within the city itself or serves to expand the city’s exports. These exports, in turn, bring in additional resources to either acquire additional imports or be reinvested into fuelling the processes that fuel import-replacement. Not for nothing does Jacobs describe import-replacement as a ‘cataclysmic’ process – these changes often happen over a very short period and can bring about a rapid influx of people, ideas and capital. We see this in New York City, which grew from half a million residents in 1850 to over 3.4 million at the dawn of the twentieth century. Detroit went from having 250,000 residents in 1900 to a peak of 1.8 million by 1950. Delhi went from a population of 1.4 million in 1950 to almost 33 million in its larger metropolitan area today. That import-replacement is such a simple idea also makes it one of the most crucial to understand for policymakers. At the end of the day, a city can provide everything it wants in terms of amenities, sprawling parks, leisure centres and cultural venues, but without that fundamental process of import-replacement taking place, an urban agglomeration will not grow and will be confined to decline. To quote Jacobs: ‘artificial symptoms of prosperity or a “good image” do not revitalize a city, but only explicit economic growth processes for which there are no substitutes.’ (The Economy of Cities, Pg 200).

So much for that idea; it is clear that import-replacement must be at the heart of any policy for urban development. How can policymakers leverage this idea when it seemingly depends so much on individual decisions made by companies and entrepreneurs? The first thing to address is what are the barriers that prevent economic import-replacement? Are land-use patterns overly strict and restrictive to new and innovative types of industry? Central to the idea of import-replacement is the idea that new forms of businesses, processes and industries will arise that cannot be foreseen in advance. It is therefore crucial that land-use regulation permits new forms of industries to emerge.

The process that Jacobs describes transcends individual policymakers, instead relying on decisions by financial institutions, entrepreneurs, and thrifty individuals. This should not lead to hopelessness. I would argue (and Jacobs, through her expansive uses of historical examples) that enterprise and trade come very naturally to human beings if the conditions are right. Whilst this does not guarantee that any city can become an economic powerhouse, since important factors including geography, human capital, and chance also play an important role, almost every region contains a dominant urban agglomeration. By minimising barriers to trade and commerce in these areas, ensuring regulation, taxes and land-use is conducive to growth rather than acting as a resistor, cities can begin to tap into the power of import-replacement and grow their economies and those of the regions surrounding them.

Finally, where I diverge from the libertarian-purist perspective is that I argue urban policymakers can play an active role in cultivating growth. For example, by creating forums for entrepreneurs to come together and exchange ideas, encouraging universities to collaborate with businesses so that jobs are created within the city (see HEC Paris’ incubator), and making sure the basic needs of the city (sanitation, safety, etc) are met, cities can help to kick-start the process of import-replacement.

One policy that seldom works, however, is offering large subsidies to companies to locate in a city – often in the form of tax breaks or land grants. There is significant literature outlining how this greatly distorts the allocation of resources on a national (and international) scale. Yet the idea is nonetheless tempting to policymakers if they think it’ll bring regional benefits. The research on this does not suggest this is the case – as highlighted in a recent essay published by the Center for American Progress. Jacobs provides a clear reason for why this is the case in both The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Put simply, big businesses which are ‘transplanted’ into smaller cities do not bring about import-replacement because they are already tightly vertically integrated. Smaller businesses, however, are more likely to tap into an existing or nascent eco-system of other businesses – in a city or elsewhere – to produce its goods. This greatly increases the likelihood of innovation and new techniques being adopted as competitors strive to improve quality and lower prices. Money spent on providing large subsidies can therefore be put to much more effective use if it is instead returned to businesses as a tax cut or channelled into the other factors that encourage import-replacement.

(2) Look at what your city does well

It is not the case that cities can purchase development by simply luring in companies, through tax breaks or other means, to set up transplants in their regions. ‘Development cannot be given, it has to be done. It is a process, not a collection of capital goods,’ notes Jane Jacobs on page 119 of Cities and the Wealth of Nations. For urban policymakers, the lesson that can be drawn from this is that the focus should be placed on the existing things a city or metropolitan area does well. It would be nonsensical for a city like Fort Wayne, Indiana, to spend billions of dollars trying to become the next Silicon Valley. Agglomeration effects matter and remain a central part of how import-replacement happens. For more effective, for small and medium-sized, is to focus on what they already do well and aim to cultivate those industries. This is less difficult than it seems for again, individuals and businesses have a remarkable ability to innovate and lead the import-replacement process themselves if the conditions are right. For urban policymakers, the focus should therefore be on identifying bottlenecks in cooperation. Are land prices prohibitive to the creation of new industries and could zoning reform unlock additional growth? Is the city the kind of place that would attract potential talent, or is crime, housing availability and educational provision undermining its ability to do so? Again, whilst actively picking and choosing winners and losers seldom works, there is an active role that policymakers can play in helping to cultivate growth in existing sectors that are performing well. Cities could partner with chambers of commerce to ensure that businessmen are connected, and ideas spread faster. Collaboration with banks and financial institutions could provide seed money for new businesses to emerge. By first focusing on the basics, then looking at the particular areas of success and finding ways to encourage them further, a city can help kick-start the growth-replacement process.

(3) Beware of over-specialisation

Import-replacement depends on specialisation. Both Jacobs and later, Edward Glaeser (in Triumph of the City) highlight the importance of urban agglomerations which increase the spread of ideas and allow firms to produce new goods and ideas without having to start from scratch. Chris Miller’s Chip Wars provides a vivid description of how this process played out in Silicon Valley, noting how specialisation allows each company to focus on adding value at one specific part of the supply chain, to the point where countless companies now focus solely on chip design, others, like GlobalFoundries focus on manufacturing, yet others on marketing, transportation, the production of equipment. It is far easier to start a company in an environment where not every aspect of the supply chain needs to be replicated and companies instead tap into an existing eco-system. The odds of innovation grow significantly, as a result of lower barriers of entry.

Except over-specialisation is at cross-purposes with the long-term success of a city, if it means that it cannot recover or surmount shocks in global supply and demand. Take the classic example of Detroit, which specialised very heavily in automobile production over the first half of the twentieth century, this growth almost entirely led by private enterprise. When automation and increased foreign competition led to a decline in the Motor City’s primary industry, workers had few alternatives. Many just left, leading to a precipitous population decline from 1.8 million to just over 640,000 today.

I will again stress that a lot of the economic dynamics occurring within a city are not things that policymakers can directly control. Subsidies might work in the short term, but as noted above, their success is very limited in the long run and the money might instead have been returned to residents in the form of a tax cut. Furthermore, no single policy prescription will work for all cities, since each faces a unique set of problems and challenges and mayors must look closely at the problems confronting their particular city.

There are nevertheless some takeaways from Jacobs’ works that might apply here and that mayors and other urban leaders could take to their cities. First is that space and layout matter. Jacobs presents a view of cities that very heavily emphasises the importance of walkability and access. I would push back a little and say that perfect walkability is not always necessary. Yet enterprises and households should be in relative proximity to each other to foster greater exchange of ideas and collaboration. A fifteen-minute drive on the highway might not make a difference. A fifty-minute drive in chock-a-block traffic would. The other ingredients to fostering urban diversity (still allowing for specialisation but in various sectors) include mixed uses of land, sufficient density to provide businesses with customers, older buildings to allow for experimentation (new or experimental businesses often can’t afford new units where costs are very high), and smaller blocks to allow for more street frontage.

Jacobs’ analysis of the factors cultivating urban economic diversity is sound, but it requires further expansion if it is to apply to traditional industry and the new creative industries. In addition to these factors, cities and states should also ensure their processes allow for flexibility and collaboration with regard to permitting and other legislation; they should ensure their processes are clear and transparent, and they should keep costs at a minimum.

Simply wishing for prosperity won’t make it so. The reality is that urban success depends on governance, ideas, and some degree of luck. But another remarkable fact emerges from the literature of Jacobs’ and others I have buried myself in over the last few weeks: human beings have an incredible ability to collaborate and innovate if left to do so. It’s a hopeful takeaway, for it means that success doesn’t depend on policymakers’ abilities to play economic planners and run a city. Focus on the basics, eliminate barriers to growth, advocate for your city, and you may well turn the odds slightly in its favour.

The post Lessons from Cities and the Wealth of Nations: a manual for urban policymakers appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of this collection of essays, studies philosophy and economics on the dual degree between Columbia University and SciencesPo Paris. Having grown up between London and Paris, he is energised by the questions of urban economics, the role of the metropolis in the global economy, urban governance and cities as spontaneous order. He works as an Applied Research Intern at the Mercatus Center.

Since man is a political animal, and an intensely social existence is a necessary condition for his flourishing, then it follows that the city is the best form of spatial organisation. In the city arises a form of synergy, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, for the remarkable thing about cities is that they tap into the brimming potential of every human being. In nowhere but the city can one find such a variety of human ingenuity, cooperation, culture and ideas. The challenge for cities is that they operate on their own logic. Cities are one of the best illustrations of spontaneous order. The city in history did not emerge as the result of a rational plan; rather, what the city represents is the physical manifestation of millions of individuals making decisions about where to locate their homes, carry out economic transactions, and form intricate social webs. This reality is difficult to reconcile with our modern preference for scientific positivism and rationalism. But for the Polis to flourish, it must be properly understood by the countless planners, reformers, politicians and the larger body of citizens inhabiting the space.

Enter Jane Jacobs. As the story of cities reached a point at which the assault on them seemed so great, so forceful and so fierce that it seemed there was no turning back, Jacobs, in her Magnum Opus ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ became one of their staunchest advocates, reminding us of their role in cultivating diversity and progress whilst also underscoring the logic on which they operate. It has been over half a century since Jacobs published this seminal work of literature. Its effects have certainly been felt, ushering in a shift in how planners, developers and policymakers alike approach urban planning, shifting their focus onto mixed-use developments, more walkable downtowns, and the cultivation of metropolitan diversity. Yet this book was never intended as an obscure manual for city planners and government mandarins. Rather it should be read as a robust defence of dense urban living aimed at underscoring its importance to overall human flourishing. This essay posits that the uses of cities go far beyond the economic dimension – they extend themselves into forging deep and meaningful human ties, stimulating intellectual and spiritual advancement, and playing an important role in what makes humans human. Revisiting The Death and Life of Great American Cities allows us to see how this continues to be true today and why the vitality and success of our cities are of importance to all who care about the success and flourishing of the human species.

Economic dimension of cities

Addressing the obvious first, very little of the material advancement that humanity has seen throughout its existence would be possible were it not for the economic diversity that cities help to cultivate. If this argument is made explicit at several points throughout the Death and Life of American Cities, it is implicit at every point throughout the book. In connecting millions of people in one place, the city acts as a giant labour market, allowing employers to find talent and workers to make a living. Cities are what translate abstract supply and demand graphs into tangible economic exchange, allowing buyers and sellers to convalesce in one place and permitting mutually beneficial exchange to take place. In a chapter entitled ‘The Need for Concentration,’ Jacobs highlights the role that high densities play in generating economic diversity, namely, that at low densities, businesses offering certain specialised goods could never afford to sustain themselves for there simply wouldn’t be enough demand. The calculation is reversed at higher densities. ‘By its nature,’ she writes, ‘the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by travelling; namely, the strange.’ Concentration goes further than providing businesses with consumers. Businesses do not exist in a vacuum, they exist and rely on an intricate network of support from suppliers, financial institutions, vendors and other interested stakeholders, all of which must be derived from somewhere. Connecting all of these people in one place greatly increases efficiencies and further allows for the quick transmission of ideas and innovation. This idea might further be connected with that of Joseph Heinrich’s in chapter 12 of his 2016 book, The Secret to Our Success. There exist many great minds whose discoveries have transformed the course of our civilisation (Edison, Kepler, and Einstein, to give a few examples). But progress and advancement do not depend on these great minds alone, what is needed is the broader diffusion and integration of these ideas into the society at large. Genius alone won’t suffice, as Heinrich’s anthropological examples on Tasmania demonstrate; that long-disconnected island, isolated from the progress and ideas of the broader society, regressed significantly during that time when it was disconnected. Cities, if permitted to do so, have the opposite effect, serving as both cultivators and connectors of new ideas that otherwise would never have been.

Context in which The Death and Life of Great American Cities Emerged

Jacobs goes to great lengths to show why (then) contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy were greatly undermining the role of cities in connecting and cultivating economic diversity. She opens her book with the line: ‘This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.’ That planning and rebuilding to which she was referring in 1961, and to some extent still present to this day despite the influence her works have had, was based on the belief that cities, despite their economic advantages, were not desirable places to live and were instead hotbeds of vice and criminality. Spearheaded by British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City proposed an alternative to dense urban growth, designating permitted land uses in specific areas, segregating residential, commercial and industrial uses, and most importantly suppressing densities so they could never rise above a certain point. A slightly amended version of these ideas came in the form of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (look it up if you’re not already familiar – it’s striking!); modernism in physical form which quickly sprang from the academic to the physical realm with the construction of vast swathes of housing projects across the United States, Soviet Union and beyond. Adding to the malaise of the city was the City Beautiful movement, kickstarted by the Columbian Exposition of 1893 which began a movement of concentrating civic buildings all in one place. The proponents of these three types of new urbanism against which Jacobs takes aim were rarely ill-intentioned, she stresses throughout. However, their ideas were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what led to successful economic diversity in cities.

For a city to succeed, grow and thrive, mixed-use of both commerce and people is needed so that an area can sustain itself uniformly throughout the day. For new ideas and businesses to emerge and take hold, the city must contain a variety of both new and old units; old units allowing economically risky ideas or with low overheads to exist. For neighbourhoods to improve, change must be gradual rather than cataclysmic, ensuring that communities and neighbourhoods have the time to form robustly. Density, more than anything, matters, but it is essential that this diversity exists in a way that the city can make use of. Density, unless accompanied by mixed-uses, short blocks which permit street life and sustain a variety of economic uses, means very little. From that effective density (that is, a density that is effective because it is combined with reasons for people to intermingle and interact with people outside of their usual social circles, if even lightly), stems all of the other benefits that cities confer: strong communities, safer streets as there will be many people to watch over them, new businesses which can tap into the city’s broader resources, and the opportunity for spontaneous and unplanned social interaction.

In response to the stultifying controls that have been imposed on our cities in the form of planning, land use, parking requirements, and density thresholds (among others) has emerged a vital movement of pro-housing advocates in the post-Jacobs era. The modern YIMBY, or Yes-In-My-Backyard, movement has rightly focussed on reducing controls and ensuring we build as much as possible, wherever possible. Condominiums, high-rises, sprawling suburban developments; new developments in any form are welcomed by YIMBYs as a means of reducing housing costs and enabling people to tap into the untapped potential that cities offer. And rightly so: pro-housing advocates often refer to the so-called ‘housing theory of everything,’ which links a lack of affordable housing to a plethora of social issues, including poverty, lack of access to education, and environmental degradation. There are strong reasons to be sympathetic to these arguments: increasing housing affordability benefits not just those who are already in cities, so too does it permit thousands more to tap into the places where they can be most productive, tap into, and create new opportunities. But Jane Jacobs offers something for us YIMBYs too, by showing us that our cities offer so much more than just economic benefits. But this is only so if urban development takes a particular form.

Cities as cultivators of diversity

‘A city’s greatest asset,’ Jacobs declares, is its ‘very wholeness in bringing together people with communities of interest.’ Cities play a central role in cultivating civic life, they allow individuals with similar interests to come in a way and interact spontaneously in a way that’s never possible at smaller densities. In suburbia, human interaction is governed by ‘togetherness,’ the requirement that much shall be shared,’ amongst residents ‘or else they must settle for lack of contact.’ Parents attend the same PTA meetings, soccer games, and birthday parties. The bar for friendship in suburbia is necessarily higher, for it entails a much greater level of commitment and intimacy. ‘Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results.’ Cities, and particularly lively sidewalks, permit another type of civic life to emerge: one where humans are loosely connected and can then choose to develop these relationships further if they so choose. Jacobs provides vivid examples from her street: the local grocers that one can ask for favours like holding keys, individuals who watch over the children of others and keep them out of trouble, ‘connectors’ who know many individuals loosely and, in connecting them, bring about the political fabric required for self-governance.

One critique levelled at Jacobs’ urban vision is that it is overly rose-tinted. This is not the case: in New York, in London, in Paris, there continue to exist pockets of urban life with a strong underlying social fabric, needed now more than ever in an age where people are increasingly inward-looking as a result of social media. Surrounding the Great Cities is another model: areas like the Clarendon neighbourhood in Virginia are a good illustration of how we can tap into the benefits of density and concentration whilst still allowing those in the suburbs to tap into these vibrant areas.

The city, notes Aristotle in Book 3 of Politics, ‘must be regarded not just for the sake of living together,’ but rather ‘for the sake of noble action.’ Jacobs is in many ways an intellectual heir of this thought: presenting why the spatial dimension matters in how we live, showing how concentration and lively mixed-use sidewalks cultivate further diversity, progress and strong civic life, then underscoring why not any form of planning will do: only that which permits for spontaneous use cases, that is not overly regimented, and most of all allow for cross-use and walkability, will suffice.

Jacobs and the defence of cities

The genius of Jane Jacobs is that her critique, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is not limited to that. This work of literature, and the richness in which her prose and descriptions come together to form an image of the city truly do make it a work of literature, fundamentally challenges the status quo and persuades us as to why urban life is so desirable. Americans have come to view the American Dream and suburban life with a white picket fence as synonymous. Jacobs urges us to look beyond that, to recognise that the city is not a place we should be resigned to living in because of the economic effects. Rather, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a reminder of how the diversity of cities is just a reflection of the individuality and uniqueness inherent in every one of us.

The post The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited appeared first on Market Urbanism.

If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. But if you read two books about Japan, as you should, the second one should be André Sorensen’s essential The Making of Urban Japan.

And readers responded – buying both books:

Now we get to delve into Emergent Tokyo. Here is my extended discussion with Professor Almazán, edited for length.

Salim Furth: I love your chapter on “yokocho”, alleys lined with tiny bars and restaurants like the one Americans see in the show Midnight Diner. Yokocho look a little like medieval Middle Eastern souks, but you point out that they originated as an orderly relocation strategy for postwar black markets, dictated and built by national authorities. Then proprietors took over, adding upper stories, changing uses, and personalizing. Is there enough space in 21^st-century building codes and business models for continued physical evolution of yokocho? How is that occurring?

Jorge Almazán: The yokocho that were created to relocate post-war black marketeers are in fact still evolving. But let me address building codes and business models separately. In terms of physical evolution, it is true that current regulations would make it very difficult to add new floors, and therefore we cannot expect additional vertical growth. But the regulation allows owners to retrofit, reinforce and renovate current buildings. Many of the young owners, for example, are transforming their bars into more open and community-oriented configurations.

Building codes are not the result of allegedly pure and innocent building science. Like any other law, they are the result of ideological assumptions, political struggle, and lobby pressure (from the real estate construction industries). We can imagine future building codes responding to current social demands towards a more human-scale approach to urbanism, allowing more proactive preservation of historical yokocho and even the creation of new ones. We have already seen legal changes in Japan pointing in this direction (as new laws or deregulation of existing ones).

But beyond the physical evolution, yokocho potential to evolve is more interesting as an urban model. That is the realm where the restaurant industry is finding creative advantages and business opportunities. Many of the latest large-scale redevelopment projects have included commercial floors with yokocho-like arrangements of small bars and restaurants, like the Toranomon Yokocho or Shibuya Yokocho, offering the diversity of atmospheres, the ease of interaction among customers, and the intimacy of the historical yokocho. That said, most of these new pseudo-yokocho only reproduce the physical arrangement of the historical yokocho. What they lack is precisely the greatest urban and business potential of the authentic yokocho: a surprisingly rich and adaptable emergent urban entity created by a multiplicity of independent actors. In [true] yokocho, independent operators engage with each other in a non-hierarchical relation of cooperative competition, creating a localized economy of agglomeration that results in an urban place much greater than the sum of its tiny parts.

Salim Furth: In the first chapter, you draw a sharp distinction between “chaos” and “emergence”. Why is emergence a better concept than chaos for understanding Tokyo?

Jorge Almazán: “Emergence” is a property of “complex systems,” which are distinct “chaotic systems” (See Stephen Wolfram’s work.) Roughly speaking, complex systems’ behavior is not regular, but it isn’t chaotic either. Complex systems have structure, even if it is difficult to define. In this formal sense, cities (including Tokyo) are closer to emergent complex systems than purely chaotic systems.

At a more popular level, “chaos” is always mentioned when talking about Tokyo, especially outside Japan. “Chaos theory” was popularized among architects in the late 1980s, and it allowed Japanese architects to see Tokyo in a more positive light. But this narrative of chaos is a dead-end. It left many architects without critical tools to analyze the city and charter a vision for the future.

In the popular discourse, “chaos” is often understood as a complete lack of planning or design. That is a dangerous conclusion. We all like the vital and energetic disorder of Tokyo, but we should recognize the underlying structures that produced it over time. Disorder needs to be designed. The idea of emergence (the spontaneous creation of order and functionality from the bottom-up) is a promising approach for all cities in general, especially for cities with a heavy top-down planning tradition. Tokyo’s light urban planning combined with the small scale of land plots, and the creativity of many of its citizens produced a particularly fertile ground that accelerates bottom-up emergent urban phenomena.

Salim Furth: Some of the spaces in Emergent Tokyo benefit from well-placed trees or potted plants. Those are almost always delightful in a city, but there’s a tension between providing space and sunlight for plants and allowing for narrow passages and tall buildings. In the U.S., the Garden City movement’s love of greenery has led to a lot of dead, oversized urban spaces. What can we learn from Tokyo about including trees in small spaces?

Jorge Almazán: This is not only an American problem. The Modernist obsession with expansive open spaces left many European post-war recent developments with too large and too ill-located parks.

Tokyo does not excel in the creation and protection of public greenery. What is really intriguing is Tokyo’s informal greenery. In many neighborhoods, even the most densely built, each neighbor maintains a tiny garden, sometimes with trees but most often small greenery and potted plants. This is a bottom-up practice, there is no local ordinance forcing owners to maintain them. In spite of their tiny size, their presence throughout the whole neighborhood creates an overall sense of greenery. 

This phenomenon has cultural roots. But it serves contemporary functions beyond visual refreshment. It is a gentle way to demarcate property boundaries and create visual barriers to keep privacy, without aggressive elements like fences and walls.

It is a way to signify a commitment to embellish the neighborhood and express the individual personality of the homeowner. Some use a Victorian style with many flowers, some use bonsai and other Japanese elements, and some cover the whole building with ivy. Recently I see many Mediterranean greenery, even olive trees, and very often potted herbs for cooking.

In our interviews, we found that small greenery triggers conversations and interactions between neighbors too. Strangers and even neighbors are more likely to talk if there is a third element or stimulus that connect them. Using Holly Whyte’s terminology, greenery is this “triangulation” device that provides a social bond between people.

Salim Furth: In Chapter 6 you convinced me that “dense, low-rise neighborhoods” are the most natural urban form in Tokyo. That is, this urban form tends to emerge from a variety of initial conditions, including planned garden suburbs (Higashi-Nakanobu), gridded artificial land (Tsukishima), and unplanned sprawl (North Shirokane).

Does this form dominate because of its intrinsic advantages or because land use institutions favored it? Several times, you describe these neighborhoods as a “delicate balance”, but it seems to me they’re more of a hardy weed.

Jorge Almazán: The reasons for the domination of this urban form are mixed. Low-rise construction has the intrinsic advantage that can be easily and cheaply designed and built, especially in wood (the dominant structural material of these neighborhoods). There is also a clear intention by planning authorities to create low-rise areas, at least in those many areas zoned as “low-rise exclusively residential areas,” with maximum heights of 10 or 12 m. What authorities probably did not foresee is the high ground coverage and population densities that many neighborhoods reached over time, as a result of disparate influences, like land subdivision to pay the high inheritance taxes, or the deregulation in FAR calculation methods.

This largely unintended result is a unique urban fabric that often strikes a balance between preserving a village-like small scale with the advantages of a metropolitan context. You are right that these urban fabrics grow and expand rapidly as weeds. But they are delicate because their best qualities can be easily damaged by internal dynamics (like the invasion of parking spaces replacing gardens); or external forces (like road widenings or large-scale redevelopments), turning them characterless and unwelcoming. Our book is a call to understand, cultivate, and harvest the beneficial effects of this native weed, rather than insisting on bulldozing and razing it.

Salim Furth: You and your colleagues are releasing a Japanese language edition later this year. How does the book serve Japanese and foreign audiences differently?

Both editions are practically identical, with a difference in framing. The English edition contextualizes Tokyo in the global discourse, emphasizing lessons that we can extract for other cities around the world. The Japanese version is framed within the internal discussions in Japan.

[Within Japan,] the relative attractiveness of Tokyo has decreased due to the recent wave of large-scale redevelopments, and there is a search for alternatives. Our book is a call to pay attention to the value of Tokyo’s own vernacular urbanism.

As foreigners, you and I are mesmerized by zakkyo buildings or yokocho, but within Japan, scholars, and authorities often ignore and neglect them as urban subproducts. In spite of their conspicuous presence and popularity, the official discourse still considers most of Emergent Tokyo as unsightly, dangerous, or underdeveloped. The book offers the Japanese readership a fresh view of their own everyday life environment as a valuable social, spatial, and even aesthetic legacy from which they could envision alternative futures.

Finally, the book uses one language that needs no translation: the lingua franca of graphics. We believe that new knowledge can be produced not only verbally or numerically, but also graphically. The discipline of scrupulously drawing all the case study areas obliged us to discard vapid rhetoric and focus on tangible aspects that can be mapped, drawn, and eventually designed. We also included numerous photographs, selected after years of fieldwork, building trust with locals, and obtaining rare permission to take bird’s-eye views and intimate interiors shots.

Salim Furth: I would ask where people should buy the book, but I think I know the answer. After reading Emergent Tokyo, one is more convinced than ever that it’s worth supporting local merchants. Small bookstores might need to special order. But the book is so visual, it deserves to be on display racks so people can touch it and flip through. It’s also available via Oro Editions and Amazon.

Jorge Almazán: Yes, and on the way home from your local bookseller, you might find a cozy café to read in.

The post Unpacking Emergent Tokyo with author Jorge Almazán appeared first on Market Urbanism.

American (and European) YIMBYs point to Tokyo as an icon and model – proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability even when demand is very strong. But this body of work is over-reliant on a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it’s time to go deep – books deep – into the fascinating details of Japan’s land use institutions.

Essentials

As with any complex social phenomenon, we are tempted to essentialize Japanese zoning. It works because it’s top-down. It works because Douglas MacArthur imposed strong property rights. It works because of Japanese traditions of impermanence. (If you’re a planner rather than a YIMBY, replace “it works” with “it’s broken”).

Sometimes – often – essential simplifications are useful. And there’s no type of book more boring than the one that promises to tell you how “everything you know about X is wrong,” and then proceeds to offer a bunch of minor caveats to the basically-correct narrative you already knew. Thankfully, this isn’t that kind of book.

Instead, what you come away with is an appreciation for how wrong each of these narratives is: Japanese land use is a delicately-balanced synthesis of centralized and scattered power. If you take away an essential story or lesson, it should be the contingency of outcomes. It works because the central planners were powerful enough to preempt local government but not powerful enough to sideline landowners. It works because local governments encouraged modernization but never had enough funding to execute urban renewal. It works because otherwise strong property rights coexisted along with Land Readjustment. It works because the postwar US and Japanese authorities did not fully enforce their own edicts. It works because of the mini-kaihatsu loophole.

It works because a very specific sequence of institutions rose and declined over a very eventful century, and none of them had the time, power, or money to fully execute its vision.

In the next sections I will draw four notable episodes or themes from the text. This is not a synoptic review – the closest you’ll get to a full narrative is the “it works” section above.

The MacArthur Myth

First off, let’s go all Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur. One of those essential stories is that the postwar U.S.-written constitution imposed strong property rights. This isn’t just incomplete-wrong, it’s wrong-wrong.

As Tsuru (1993) carefully explains…the American draft of the article on land rights was strongly resisted by the Japanese government. The original Article 28 in MacArthur’s draft read, “The ultimate fee to the land and to all natural resources reposes in the State as the collective representative of the people.”

Wait, what? “Reposes in the state”? Did the Soviets get there first?

This approach of the MacArthur draft was eventually replaced by the following wording suggested by the Japanese side which is now Article 29 of the Japanese constitution: “The right to own or to hold property is inviolable. Property rights shall be defined by law, in conformity with the public welfare…” Tsuru (1993:27) suggests that this wording is basically identical to the old Article 27 of the Meiji constitution, and is much more conservative in its protection of the rights of landowners and its weak conception of the public interest than the initial American draft.

Sorensen, p. 156.

Inviolable!

Land Readjustment

A country with inviolable property rights wouldn’t let a two-thirds majority of landowners force the minority to give up their land for a joint development scheme, would it?

¯\_(?)_/¯

I told you it was a delicately balanced synthesis.

The basic structure of LR is that two-thirds of owners representing two-thirds of land can vote to pool a specified area of land, overriding holdouts. Public ways and land are then laid out and the remaining land is redivided among the original property owners.

Planned growth in Japan has relied on Land Readjustment (LR) to an extraordinary degree. With no need for up-front funding and landowner votes as a check on bad ideas, LR may well be superior to eminent domain or land assembly for laying out new neighborhoods.

Sorensen characterizes suburban Japan as a patchwork of planned spaces, where LR succeeded, and “sprawl”, where uncoordinated rural development preceded planning via loopholes and political meddling.

Mini-kaihatsu, here and there

One American myth of Japanese land use is that national bureaucrats keep local planners on a leash, preventing them from zoning more strictly. Where that’s correct, it’s almost accidentally so. National bureaucrats, in Sorensen’s telling, have consistently pushed for greater regulation. But when prefectures had the choice of setting a key regulatory threshold at 500 or 1,000 square meters, “only a few” took the stricter option (p. 236).

That 1,000 square meter threshold became the “mini-kaihatsu loophole”. In rural fringe areas, a development below 1,000 square meters did not need development permission.

A typical mini-kaihatsu development consists of 12 houses fronting on a narrow 4 metre lane running at right angles from an existing road.

Sorensen, p. 238

A common size for rice paddies was, “conveniently”, one tan, or 992 square meters.

Here’s a picture of a typical mini-kaihatsu:

Oops, wrong photo. That’s Houston. Here are some Japanese examples from Google:

The concept is the same, and it’s no coincidence that both arise in places with light regulation, strong demand, and little public streets funding. As I wrote about Houston:

Houstonians achieve privacy by orienting many new townhouses onto a share courtyard-driveway, sometimes gated, which creates an intermediate space between the private home and the public street…
The courtyard-driveways also provide a shared play space, as evidenced by frequent basketball hoops. Despite what Jane Jacobs may have told you, city streets are not viable play spaces for 21st-century children. But cul-de-sacs can be. Houston’s courtyard-and-grid model may be the ideal blend, unlocking the connectivity of a city while delivering the secure sociability of a cul-de-sac to a large share of homes.

Ancient alleys

Cul-de-sac alleyways played an important role in pre-modern urban Japan. Sorensen calls them “back-alley nagaya” (shacks or tenements) and notes that the “landowner would often manage and live above a shop fronting the street,” while their employees, or poor artisans lived in the rear areas accessed by a narrow covered lane.”

Other authors have put a more romantic gloss on the alleys. Jinnai Hidenobu says that “designs displayed a sensitivity to what Maki Fumihiko has called ‘hidden depth'”.

[New] groups of urban dwellers, such as factory workers and low-wage white-collar workers, also made their homes in the backstreets. At the entrance to the alley, a wooden wicket was placed, clearly demarcating the main street (public) from the backstreet (semi-public) spaces… In such backstreets, not only could landlords and tenants form a trusting relationship, but tenants themselves lived with one another on the most neighborly terms.

…In Edo, it was in such micro-spaces that a certain degree of self-government took shape; it was in these same back alleys that the foundation of stable society was laid.

Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, pp. 124-125.

Jordan Sand’s Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects includes a chapter on how alley exploration and appreciation helped form one neighborhood’s identity in 1980s Tokyo.

Most recently, Almazan and Studiolab’s Emergent Tokyo profiles Tsukishima, a modern neighborhood “famous for its narrow roji alleyways.”

[Roji] are often used almost as an extension of the domestic space. As in so many Tokyo neighborhoods, in Tsukishima one sees subtle transitions along the spectrum of public to private space rather than a hard division between the two.

Almazan & Studiolab, p. 172

American urbanists generally hate cul-de-sacs, which prevent connectivity. But residents, especially those with children, love them. And even New Urbanists have re-invented them, calling them “cottage courts.” The “Houston mini-kaihatsu” is a proven economic model for an urban form too universal to be dismissed.

The planner’s gaze

It isn’t just alleys that Sorensen judges more harshly than other writers do. In fact, he has a hard time finding anything good to say about Japan’s land use.

Sorensen’s virtue is his stolid Canadian insistence on presenting facts clearly and with a minimum of emotion. As a reader, one senses that Sorensen’s prejudices seep into the text against his will. (And one trembles to think what unreadable diatribes would have been produced by someone with his sensibilities but not his restraint).

A key example comes on pp. 222-223, where Sorensen nets up the effects of Japan’s zoning code, which allows very mixed uses. He has a long paragraph noting the positive effects – but the words are all in others’ mouths. He cites Jane Jacobs, Jinnai, and six others who point out “very positive consequences of Japan’s radically inclusive approach to land use zoning.” In the next two paragraphs, however, he provides the counterpoint – in his own voice, with only one citation.

It is hard not to feel that Sorensen is favorably disposed toward anything planned and skeptical, if not hostile, to anything unplanned. To Sorensen, “sprawl” denotes unplanned, “haphazard” growth (p. 326). Planned growth, at the same densities, in the same areas, is not sprawl. The same bias pervades his (otherwise excellent!) 2001 article, Building Suburbs in Japan.

He rarely defends his planner’s-eye view. He doesn’t holistically compare planned to unplanned areas and find the latter lacking. Nor does he define key metrics of urban success (e.g. pollution levels, commute times, and housing costs). Instead, he seems to have an intuitive desire to see plans made and brought to fruition, regardless of the merits.

In an era when Tokyo stands as “humanity’s greatest urban achievement,” the institutions that created it deserve a little more credit. But even if Sorensen doesn’t like them, he reports their workings faithfully – and that makes his book a must-read for Tokyophile market urbanists.

The post Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But there are more fundamental reasons to choose to live in a metropolitan area. The narrow choice of city versus suburb is a balance of cost and amenities. But the bigger question – in which region should I make my home? – requires one to look on a higher plane.

Life satisfaction, for most of us, comes from deeply held commitments (stubborn attachments, one might say) to specific other people and, often, small voluntary associations. Most people cannot form those commitments at will. And most people do not open themselves to deep friendships unless they believe that the counterparty is committed to them.

Stubborn attachments obviously exist in rural areas and small towns – perhaps quite a bit more than in metropolitan areas, as Rod Dreher argues in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. But for an outside work-from-homer, that tightly woven community can be difficult to break into. Deeper connections require deeper commitments. Can Celestus credibly commit to staying in one, particular rural town? What if his job changes? What if there’s a nasty fight at the volunteer fire department – will he cut bait and move? He cannot credibly commit to remaining if the going gets tough.

Furthermore, moving to a distant rural area will make all of Celestus’ existing relationships harder to maintain, unless he has existing ties there.

Thus, Celestus is likely to be happiest in a metropolitan area where he already has some meaningful ties and where he has a plausible prospect of remaining anchored as his job and life evolve. That prospect will quietly change him, creating and meeting a greater capacity for satisfaction.

The deepest attachments, for most of us, are to family. And metropolitan areas are more probable places to enable a loose collection of relatives to live in proximity. Unless several extended family members happen to be footloose and like-minded, a move to a distant rural location will make holidays a chore – and remove those who care most about you from your daily life. Metropolitan areas have enough types of work to solve this coordination problem, either by choice or serendipity.

I’m blessed with an extended family that exemplifies this principle: when Furths grow up and move away from home, we often find kin where our jobs or educations take us. Thus my uncle in Columbus babysits his grand-niece and -nephew; my aunt in Los Angeles cooks real food for a sojourning nephew; two cousins shared a house in Fort Collins for a while; an elderly cousin moved from New York to a DC-area nursing home where several of us could visit regularly. Our Thanksgiving dinners feature nearness of geography as much as of blood.

Conversely, optimizing for amenities will also change one, usually for the worse. I watched dear friends attempt to take advantage of the pandemic by moving first to Europe and then to coastal California. The history and nature (respectively) were awesome. But they returned deeply unhappy and with less capacity than before for loving, and being loved, by any particular community.

The cover photo is by Andrew Kambel on StockSnap

The post Why Should a Remote Worker Live in a City? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

During a working vacation in the Netherlands, I had the dissonant experience of reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in one of the most comprehensively planned environments on earth. Hayek’s thesis is that central economic planning displaces competitive markets and, when broadly applied, paves the way for totalitarianism. The premise of Holland is that strict central planning is necessary to avoid being underwater. And the planning covers much more than water: in the Netherlands, centralized land use and transportation planning uphold a pleasant, sustainable lifestyle and growth pattern.

Although the Dutch experience is not a slam-dunk case against Serfdom, it certainly raises questions. It’s not only that the Netherlands has avoided becoming a totalitarian state, but it has largely produced an excellent built environment which the present author finds far more enjoyable than anything on offer in the U.S.

Several caveats are in order. Hayek did not predict that planning a single aspect of the national economy would lead to totalitarianism. He even offers ‘modern towns’ as an area where some planning is necessary (p. 48). One should read Serfdom with a sort of “inflation adjustment” for the apocalyptic rhetoric given that it was written during an apocalyptic era. Finally, I do not claim a unique level of expertise in either Hayek or Dutch spatial planning. This essay was informed by Barrie Needham’s book and conversations with planning officials from several Dutch cities.

Is it really central planning?

Unlike in the U.S., the Dutch built environment is centrally planned. Gemeenten (municipalities) are not free to diverge from national and provincial priorities, and any major greenfield development must win provincial and sometimes national approval. Regulation systematically imposes an integrated rational scheme totally unlike U.S. zoning.

Dutch spatial and transportation planning is the outcome of consensus decision-making within a fairly intimate professional class at various levels of government. This polycentricity may be part of the reason that the quality of the planning is so high and the system can execute across many domains (transport, development, water, etc.).

For example, Dutch governments at all levels have systematically prioritized cycling for decades, with strong public support. That priority is expressed not only in road building, but in all related domains. In a new Utrecht development, for instance, city planners are pushing the developers to provide five bike parking spaces per apartment, a costly proposition. With a less unified planning class, the whole system would become beset with bottlenecks.

There is no wizard behind the curtain directing the apparatus. But if this isn’t “central planning,” then we can dismiss that concept as a purely theoretical straw man.

In the U.S., by contrast, planning departments, zoning boards, water authorities, and state transportation departments frequently fail to communicate, let alone coordinate. For example, when the Metro was extended into Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1970s, the county was under a moratorium on major new construction due to lack of sewer capacity. The county is still retrofitting its underdeveloped Metro station areas, which should have been primed for transit-oriented development from day one.

The Public Realm

The obvious tradeoff between American and Dutch cities is that the former provide generous quantities of private space while the latter offer an exceptionally attractive public realm. New subdivisions not only have thoughtfully executed walking, cycling, and driving access, they also have traditional waterways and open space. Somehow, even new subdivisions have mature trees.

The presence of cars in city centers has sharply declined since I lived in Holland in the late 1990s. One planner I spoke to said that although car ownership has risen during that period, kilometers driven has remained steady because the country has made large investments in improving transit and cycling infrastructure (it was already the best in the world, but it’s noticeably better now).

Today, Dutch cities are designed to draw cars toward highways, which are often quite narrow. Car-oriented businesses and manufacturing zones cluster in business districts along the highways; no suburban residential district is car-oriented. Instead, suburban streets are narrow, low-speed spaces with limited sightlines and brick paving. Some streets feel more like shared driveways than streets in the American sense.

It is a commonplace among New Urbanists and other American city-lovers to point to medieval European towns as exemplars of mixed uses, walkability, and other virtues that American cities lack. This is fine, but contemporary Dutch urban design is much more relevant and almost as attractive as the medieval cities – which, in any case, have a larger share of 20^th– and 21^st-century buildings than you might expect.

How does a Dutch planner integrate modern dwellings into a medieval center? Among other things, by requiring the builder to vary the heights of floors and windows in neighboring townhouses. Nothing is built in the Netherlands today that does not meet – and exceed – the design goals of American New Urbanists.

Competence and Trust

In Amsterdam, the Houthavens redevelopment features multi-million euro condos in buildings that rise like piers from the city’s main waterway, the IJ. A friend from Delaware, James Wilson, pointed out the ground floor windows about six inches above the waterline. Americans could never do this, he said. We would not trust the builder to make a building so watertight. We would not trust the window manufacturer. We would not trust the water authority to keep the water level perfectly constant. Our insurers would not insure this. Our families would not buy it. Our regulators would not permit it. Our builders would not attempt it.

The Dutch expect an equal level of competence in spatial planning. For example, the Hague’s major Ypenburg expansion brought it into conflict with the existing semi-rural settlement pattern. One old road posed a traffic conundrum: it would be a natural cut-through for the new traffic. In the U.S., this situation would either result in the whole development being blocked – the NIMBY solution – or the road becoming congested and [trigger warning] its rural character forever destroyed. The Dutch found a technical solution: a grade-level intersection where turns are impossible. As the picture below shows, the intersection’s curbs are built right up to the lane lines so that the only choice is to drive straight.

In the U.S., civil engineers are not intellectually equipped to innovate. The professional culture is driven by compliance to universal standards, not situational problem-solving.

The Dutch expectation of competence extends to public life. One afternoon, I was enjoying a beer and sandwich at a sidewalk café. An SUV was parallel parking, at the same grade, a few inches from the back of my chair. It did not occur to me until afterwards that this would have made me very uncomfortable in America. Whereas Americans, blessed with abundant land, use physical distance to create safety in many contexts, the Dutch rely on universal competence.

[Edit: James Wilson points out a paradox here. Dutch road design does not assume competence, or attentiveness from users; instead, it uses physical design to minimize the consequences of driver carelessness. Most importantly, city streets are narrow and turn frequently so that speeding is near-impossible.]

The Housing Crisis

Despite radically different spatial regulatory and planning systems, the U.S. and the Netherlands (and many other countries) have arrived at the same system failure: high housing costs in major coastal cities. Just as in the U.S., already-high home prices were exacerbated by a pandemic-era spike.

The Netherlands’ primary tool for providing social housing is along the same lines as inclusionary zoning, claiming 10 to 40 percent of units in new developments. Large non-profits manage much of the country’s social housing. As in the U.S., requiring below-market units in any development lowers profitability. But the cost effect in the Netherlands is likely dwarfed by the basic scarcity of developable land. Because the central planners fully control the levers of housing supply , they can extract deep concessions in terms of design, social housing, and infrastructure – so long as prices remain far above construction costs.

Dutch regulation is in some ways the reverse of ours; they have minimum densities, not maximums. Since American regulations have no density minimums, deregulation can only increase density. But Dutch planners firmly believe that deregulation in their context would result in larger lots and bigger houses. That leaves a market urbanist a little lost in the Netherlands: I like what the planners are producing, but not the way they produce it.

The Bike Path to Serfdom

Remember Hayek? This is an essay about Hayek.

I don’t expect totalitarianism from clever intersection design or bicycle parking mandates. But Hayek argues that planning should lead to significantly different outcomes than mere regulation. And he lays out some of those consequences in Serfdom.

Decline in the Rule of Law. That is, different rules apply to different people. This is clearly endemic to the Netherlands’ spatial planning, although it may be that no system is immune to the favoritism or speculation that attend spatial decisions.

One of the Hague’s planning priorities is to improve its neighborhood shopping streets by (further) demoting cars. A planner showed me one street that had gotten fantastic treatment: traffic calming, stone sidewalks, art, parking spaces above street grade, and room for sidewalk cafes – all without disturbing the mature plane trees. Not surprisingly, this was the main shopping street of the Statenkwartier, one of the richest neighborhoods in the city.

A similar street in a nearby middle-class neighborhood received decidedly simpler treatment. And the shopping streets I saw in immigrant districts were unimproved. As my host admitted, every business district wanted the slow-street treatment, but those with political connections got the first places in line.

More consequentially, permitted greenfield development is so lucrative that speculators buy up likely parcels outside cities, and municipalities lobby hard for provincial permission to expand. This tug of war takes place out of public view and yields no vacation photos but it determines urban growth and form and makes fortunes and careers.

Departures from representative government. Development can also involve hardball politics, to the point of sweeping aside rival political institutions in order to execute a plan. The Province of South Holland wanted to address its housing shortage by building a dense urban center in a former airfield and farmland across several suburban municipalities. The suburbs would have happily developed the land, but not as densely and with less social housing than the province wanted.

So the province redrew the municipal boundaries, giving the site to the Hague. Four suburban municipalities consolidated into two in an attempt to stop the annexation, but to no avail. The province wanted dense, urban development, and the Hague was willing and able to execute the plan.

Mission creep. Hayek contends that once planning begins, it will inevitably creep into other spheres in order to keep the plan from failing. This has not largely occurred in the Netherlands. The Dutch plan space and transport in morbid detail but are open to trade, sectoral shifts, and – significantly, given the housing pressures – migration. There are conflicts between industry and spatial planners which are not always resolved in the latter’s favor. For instance, industrial interests at the provincial level want higher-clearance drawbridges over major canals. Raising the clearance of a bike bridge from 1.5 to 3 meters doubles its cost – but the city of Delft might have to build the high bridges anyway.

“The worst get on top.” Hayek argues that totalitarian systems favor the unscrupulous. It’s not clear from Serfdom whether he thinks that central planning institutions in more liberal contexts also attract bad actors. The more obvious, quotidian risk is that politically connected incompetents get positions of power. That’s clearly not happening in the Netherlands. The planners could fairly be called bureaucrats or even ideologues, but they are very good at their jobs.

Regulation or planning?

The failures of planning in the Netherlands – high housing costs, occasional favoritism, and political hardball – are all failures common to just about every other government system. The greatest weakness may be that the Dutch system relies on a level of technical competence and professional harmony from its planners that exceeds the standard practice in the U.S. and, I think, most developed countries.

A more interesting question, I think, is whether regulation is as preferable to central planning as Hayek suggests. As a consumer, I vastly prefer the carefully, competently planned Dutch cities to the regulated but uncoordinated American ones. I suspect builders feel the opposite way. But is there any way to separate the institutional choices from the culture of competence and land scarcity? What would it look like for a U.S. state – or even a county – to replace regulation with central planning? I suspect it would be a sloppy mess, since no entity has the power, experience, or persuasiveness to bring together every aspect of good city-building.

And how much would the Netherlands change if it replaced planning with regulation? There are simply too many variables.

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