Connor Tabarrok has an excellent new primer on Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs), covering history, function, governance, and critiques. … [Read more...]
Liberty Machines™
During an urbanist twitter free-for-all last week, the thoroughly awesome term "liberty machines" was used to describe the virtues of the car. The claim was made that cars let individuals go wherever they want, whenever they want and are therefore a ‘freedom enhancing’ form of … [Read more...]
A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]
Caos Planejado, in conjunction with Editora BEI/ArqFuturo, recently published A Guide to Urban Development (Guia de Gestão Urbana) by Anthony Ling. The book offers best practices for urban design and although it was written for a Brazilian audience, many of its recommendations have universal … [Read more...]
A Smart City in Your Pocket: From top-down command centers to bottom-up app markets
Cities, for most of human history, were dumb. At least, that’s what the “smart cities” movement might lead you to believe. Over the past few years, a chorus of acquisitive multinational tech corporations, trend-savvy politicians, and optimistic developers—an odd mixture of former SimCity … [Read more...]
What Would Moses Do? (Robert Moses, that is…)
(Map of Robert Moses' unbuilt proposals via “vanshnookenraggen.”) Sandy Ikeda blogs: If Moses were around today I don’t think he’d waste any time getting every major project he could think of “shovel ready” for hundreds of billions of stimulus money. While he’s no longer with us, I do fear … [Read more...]
How FDR’s TVA Went Wrong
Jim Powell’s latest article at Reason discusses the Tennessee Valley Authority, FDR’s most ambitious infrastructure program: It was heralded as a program to build dams that would control floods, facilitate navigation, lift people out of poverty, and help America recover from the Great … [Read more...]
Urban[ism] Legend: Positive NPV Infrastructure
As Washington debates how many hundreds-of-billions of the nearly trillion-dollar stimulus will go towards infrastructure or to other spending/tax cut schemes, pundits claim that spending billions on "shovel ready" public works projects can effectively create jobs that will lead to recovery. As … [Read more...]
Yes, Virginia, government roads really are government subsidized, and no, they don’t approximate freed-market outcomes
Recently, I came accross an article by Charles Johnson, who blogs at Rad Geek. The article had linked to a Market Urbanism post about how user fees and gas taxes fall well short of funding road use in the US. Charles' article further debunks the Urbanism Legend asserted by free-market imposters … [Read more...]