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Tag Friedrich Hayek

Towards A Liberal Approach To Urban Form

It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. — Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty Imagine the perfect city. If you have a clear picture in mind, you’re not alone. Tsars, emperors, and prophets have been trying to build perfect cities for millennia. With the emergence of the field of urban planning and modern social science, everyone from stenographers to industrialists to independent architects have joined in. For Ebenezer Howard, the perfect city was the Garden City, a corporate-owned residential satellite on the outer edge of town. For Le Corbusier, it was the Ville Radieuse, full of “skyscrapers in the park” and elevated highways. For Frank Lloyd Wright, it was Broadacre City, a dispersed anti-city full of single-family homes on one-acre lots. Each reflects a distinct vision of urban life, and each seems to have as many opponents as it does proponents.   Thankfully, few of these plans have ever been implemented in full on a mass scale. Yet “perfect city” thinking—the view that one particular vision of urban form should be imposed by planners—has manifested itself in small ways in cities around the world through the construction and enforcement of specific theories of how a city should work. This approach to urban form involves expanding urban planning beyond prudentially managing infrastructure and mitigating destructive negative externalities and toward enforcing and preserving particular lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. Consider: while Ville Radieuse was never built, many cities bulldozed traditional urban neighborhoods to construct the urban elevated highways of Le Corbusier’s dreams. While Broadacre City never moved beyond the model stage, many suburban communities still zone minimum lot sizes […]

Urban Design and Social Complexity

This week’s column is drawn from a lecture I gave at the University of Southern California on the occasion of the retirement of urban economist Peter Gordon. One of my heroes is the urbanist Jane Jacobs, who taught me to appreciate the importance for entrepreneurial development of how public spaces—places where you expect to encounter strangers—are designed. And I learned from her that the more precise and comprehensive your image of a city is, the less likely that the place you’re imagining really is a city. Jacobs grasped as well as any Austrian economist that complex social orders such as cities aren’t deliberately created and that they can’t be. They arise largely unplanned from the interaction of many people and many minds. In much the same way that Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek understood the limits of government planning and design in the macroeconomy, Jacobs understood the limits of government planning and the design of public spaces for a living city, and that if governments ignore those limits, bad consequences will follow. Planning as taxidermy Austrians use the term “spontaneous order” to describe the complex patterns of social interaction that arise unplanned when many minds interact. Examples of spontaneous order include markets, money, language, culture, and living cities great and small. In her The Economy of Cities, Jacobs defines a living city as “a settlement that generates its economic growth from its own local economy.” Living cities are hotbeds of creativity and they drive economic development. There is a phrase she uses in her great work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, that captures her attitude: “A city cannot be a work of art.” As she goes on to explain: Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works […]

Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”

Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there’s important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws. They are embarking on an undertaking of noble intentions, and I will explain why the technology sector needs to be at the forefront of thinking about cities.  However, in the pursuit of designing “new” cities from a “blank slate” they have begun their quest with one fatally flawed premise, that wise technocrats can master-build entirely new cities catering to the infinitely diverse set of needs and desires of yet-to-be-identified citizens.   Any visions of city-building must first humbly acknowledge that cities are an “emergent” phenomena.   According to wikipedia, “emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”   What makes cities vibrant are the “spontaneous order” which emerges among city dwellers as they pursue their individual desires. Cities are like the internet – networks, patterns, and interactions emerge not through design but from spontaneous order.  Like no entity could conceivably understand or control the internet, no entity has the knowledge to anticipate the desires of millions of individual agents, and design a city accordingly.  This is called the “knowledge problem.” According to economist Friedrich Hayek: If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the […]

Market Urbanism MUsings: February 26, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Nolan Gray contributed a post Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning discussing Jacobs’ three arguments against central planning: Hayek and Jacobs defended the importance of local knowledge, illustrated the power of decentralized planning, and celebrated the sublime spontaneous orders that organize our lives. Yet their theoretical innovations went largely unnoticed long after their respective publications. Here, the two thinkers diverge: while Hayekian ideas have largely driven centralized economic planning into the dustbin of history, I suspect the Jacobsian urban revolution has only just begun. The post was also discussed at Reason and Urban Liberty 2. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer is now in Oklahoma City, with plans to spend this weekend in Stillwater, OK. This week at Forbes, he described urban liberals’ inability to understand housing “filtering”: Officials believe that if new projects can’t be forced to charge lower prices, they shouldn’t be allowed at all. A smarter approach would be to view such projects the way one would view a gated community of mansions. Sure, such housing isn’t affordable, but it still serves a purpose: to provide rich people a place to live, thereby opening up older, smaller, less luxurious units for lower-income people. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nolan Gray shared a CityLab piece quantifying the influx of young people in downtowns Private Protection Co. Puts Govt. Police to Shame in Detroit via Mark Frazier Bad news from John Morris: L.A. is seizing tiny homes from the homeless What Computer Games Taught Daniel Hertz About Urban Planning via Erik Genc 4. Elsewhere: Strong Towns spent the week discussing the numerous ways federal housing policies distort the marketplace against walkable urban environments.  Lots of good reads and podcasts… Chicago plans to use Eminent Domain to seize the old Post Office and sell it. (when Chicago issues an RFP, […]

Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning

Cities are fantastically dynamic places, and this is strikingly true of their successful parts, which offer a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people. – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities For most of the field’s history, prominent urban planning theorists have taken for granted that cities require extensive central planning. With the question framed as “To plan or not to plan?” students and practitioners answer with an emphatic “Yes,” subsequently setting out to impose their particular ideal order on what they perceived to be, as Lewis Mumford put it, “solidified chaos.” Whether through the controlled centralization of Le Corbusier or the controlled decentralization of Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright, cities were to be just that: controlled. When in 1961 Jane Jacobs set out to attack the orthodox tradition of urban planning, it was this dogma that landed squarely in her crosshairs. With her characteristically deceptive simplicity, she invites us to ask, “Who plans?” While many take Jacobs’ essential contribution to be her insights into urban design, her subversion begins at the theoretical level in the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Despite their diverse aesthetic preferences, Corbusier and Howard share much in common. Both assume that planning entails the enshrining of a single plan and the suppression of all other individual plans. Both insist on imposing a “pretended order” on the “real order,” treating the city as a simple machine rather than a manifestation of organized complexity. Like Adam Smith’s “man of system,” each thinker was “so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he [could not] suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.” Jane Jacobs’ critique of this orthodox tradition unfolds in three steps, closely following F.A. Hayek’s argument in […]

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