The Private Production of Urban Planning

0:00The title of our paper is The Private Production of Urban Planning, and the genesis for this paper came back in college when I was rooming with an urban planner, a guy that was in the sociology department, and there was also a faculty member in the philosophy department where I was studying, and in any discussions that came across libertarianism, my roommate kind of had these quick defeaters for the whole idea of liberty and talking about what What about roads? What about zoning? And all the things that he was studying. He was just of the mindset that this is, you need a state to do it, you need a government to do it. It doesn't make sense to talk about liberty in certain contexts. So I've been bouncing ideas with Stephen, the co-author of this paper, bouncing ideas off each other about how we can approach this. It's easy enough to say the market will do it, but we're trying to start some philosophical groundwork for showing the compatibility of taking care of

1:01essential needs within the context of libertarianism. So the history of urban planning goes back as far as society has organized itself beyond the bare structures of family and small tribes and so on. Planning in those situations which is typically land use planning runs into natural organic Limits, as it begins to create commons, so while human society always tends to organize itself along the principle of community, communal everything can be economically inefficient at best and really an economic disaster at worst. Urban planning as a term is used almost exclusively today as a child of the early to mid 20th century progressive era, as people It is the Hobbesian central planning answer to the fundamental problems that plague our cities today, which ironically were caused by previous planning errors, poverty, overcrowding, crime, traffic, and so on. It is most often planning in the worst sense, rash economic and Social Assumptions packaged together and enforced on a local population by the state.

2:22Even worse, most planners believe that their activity serves the common good. That's why they're in it. In her introduction to the death and life of great American cities, Jane Jacobs wrote this book in the, I believe it was published in the early 60s, and by the way Rothbard had very high praise for this book. Jane Jacobs, very libertarian minded, I think without knowing it at the time she wrote the book, described urban planning as it existed in America at that point this way, quote, there is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend, the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars adjusted for inflation, that's about a trillion dollars, a little less than that, we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great dull gray belts that were yesterday's Suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money and perhaps even solve the traffic problem. That such wonders may be accomplished, people who get marked

3:24with the planners' hex-signs are pushed about, expropriated, uprooted much as if they were subjects of a conquering power. Businesses are destroyed and their proprietors ruined with hardly a gesture of compensation. The economics of city rebuilding rests on vast Involuntary Subsidies Wrung Out of Helpless State Victims, The Means to Planned City Rebuilding Are as Deplorable as the Ends. Now, it would be easy to dedicate this paper to critiquing modern ideas of urban planning. And in fact, if you search in the literature, as I have, what you find is pretty much anything in libertarian literature that addresses urban planning takes that angle. It's a critique of the state and what it's doing.

4:10And none of this criticism is misdirected, of course, because planning has a tremendous impact on the day-to-day life of the population it controls. And we contend that this is precisely the reason why the impact of urban planning is precisely the reason that warns us against entrusting it to the state. Yet it does not follow from the follies of state urban planners that planning as such is incompatible with a free society within its proper limits. Urban planning can be defined as the science that integrates the disciplines of land use planning and transport planning, with sociological implications. We contend that neighborhood and city planning can be, is likely to be, and should be provided within the framework of a free market for the purposes of interpersonal, community, and human flourishing. We also find it a neglected topic in typical libertarian discussions, and we think that urban planning Planning can be mentioned as a tool of the free market, just as much as farming, manufacturing, security and other goods and services are. Consider two brief examples of how a libertarian

5:18understanding of urban planning can change libertarian discourse. The first is external. It gives libertarians something to cite against some of the more common objections raised against free market theory in general. I'm thinking of my roommate here. Just as citing Roads, Police or Courts often serve as defeaters of liberalism for the common man. So also are the following objections treated as strong counter examples to the notion of liberty. But how might garbage collection or fire protection work? Or what about when a brothel builds its house next door to me? I don't want that. Or our personal favorite, what if all of the One of the land surrounding my house is purchased, and then the evil owner denies me access to it, trapping me in.

6:05It's a crime that these easily answered objections satisfy so many, who conclude that therefore, libertarianism as such is insufficient to handle society's needs. But think for a moment about what is built into these objections. In each of these examples, someone is essentially claiming that in a free society, there will be no service to meet oppressing essential market demand. To our sensibilities, these concerns are answered by the central characteristic of the free market to maximize satisfaction for any given want. Yet not everyone agrees with this abstract resolution. And this objection is not entirely unfounded. After all, the market as an abstract entity won't take care of private roads, medicine or any other good or service, concrete individuals, namely entrepreneurs and businessmen, have to. Therefore, libertarians are wise to expound upon the kinds of companies or organizations that will handle individual problems and needs. Plenty of work has been done in this area on concerns relating to private security, roads and money and other goods and services. We think that a more extensive libertarian theory of urban

7:15and Planning will likewise provide a solid answer to legitimate questions or objections, and provide the substance to challenge those who think they can dismiss capitalism with a flippant wave of the hand. The second example lays entirely within our own community. Free market ideology tends to foster a resistance to collectivism in all of its forms. In many cases this is a good thing, however some libertarians under the influence of this impulse go as far to to reject all forms of social organization, compulsory and free, but our perspective is that many traditional institutions, family, organized religion, communities formed both by interest in geography, friendships and so on, organizations that often require individual sacrifices for the good of the whole are essential to a flourishing society. It is not collective of Efforts, or commitments that are wrong per se, providing that such relationships are voluntary.

8:15In this introduction I've laid out our bottom line. The rest of this paper is going to give a little bit of flesh to these preliminary claims. And the second section of this paper will take our appeal that planning is compatible with a free society and ground it more firmly in a libertarian framework, and Stephen's going to present that. And then the third and final section of this paper is going to place this argument in the larger context of the Eudaimonist libertarian understanding of human nature, which is an Aristotelian liberal tradition. So Stephen's going to present the next section. I wish I had some pictures or something up there. I'm sure we could show all these wonderful plans that people had 50 years ago, which are now slums where people live, or at least are dying.

9:01So that'd be really effective, but I'm a crank and I'm not very good with computers. So starting, essentially, underlying the permissibility for urban planning in a free society is that it could be voluntary, right? Daniel already said if there is a need, a demand that people have, then it seems to be a prima facie claim that there's a market that will meet that need, and certain planning Banking efforts seem to fall under the umbrella of needs. For instance, if a contractor contracts with builders, plumbers, electricians, why not park planners, street layers, pool builders, etc., if he does something like that, whether or not he acknowledges it, he's essentially undertaking something like urban planning.

9:52A contractor or neighborhood's customers will likely be concerned with, among other things, How well placed and kept up his parks are, how accessible his streets are, and how shielded from NIMBY concerns he is. NIMBY concern is an acronym for not in my backyard. These are concerns like brothels being built next door, airports within a measurable distance, or football stadiums. I never thought of that before, but those do not look like nice places to live. It is likely that customers will demand this service in a free society because they are by and large demanding it now. In the market, consumers' demands are met directly and immediately communicated to entrepreneurs through profit and loss. Unhappy customers quickly make their feelings known. Contrast this with the market strategy of state urban planners who advocate, quote, and this is from the New Urbanism Constitution, this is really great, quote, the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles.

10:50Neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population. Cities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car. Cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spheres and community institutions. Urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate ecology and building practice. It may well be that in free society neighborhoods should be diverse, that people would walk more and utilize mass that public spaces would be readily acceptable and so on, but an urban planner in a free society will direct resources in order to meet the demands of buyers, not expropriate the consumer's money to meet his personal preferences, his being the urban planner.

11:38So we'll look at some of these a little bit closer, see exactly how that might pan out. When buying a house, the obvious expectations are good plumbing and electricity, strong foundations, nice yard and other features of the structure and functionality of the building. Other current consumer demands, less obvious perhaps, but just as important, are the access to and quality of roads, parks, security, shopping centers, schools, fire protection, pools, etc. Still other concerns are ones that we rarely consider, but if faced with a problem we desperately seek to solve, here we have in mind NIMBY concerns, neighborhood rules, the like. These and other concerns exist today and would persist in free society. Without the state apparatus to take care of them, people would look elsewhere to meet A likely place for one to look would be his contractor or neighborhood association.

12:27This is because in the same way that one does not expect to call a plumber to install piping or an electrician to install wiring, one could just as easily not expect to have to call a road company in order to finish the line up to his driveway or a police agency in order to ensure his protection. In most cases, the contractor building the subdivision will have contracted this work Workout or the Neighborhood Association would arrange for companies to take care of it. The consumer buys not just a house, but a membership in a community. He simply has to sign the dotted line and enjoy the amenities from his purchase, either on a yearly contractual basis with membership dues or some other form of payment. In this way, the contractor or neighborhood association has essentially become an urban planner, even if not by title. This is an important distinction because this account of planning, that of entrepreneurs Contractors meeting the demands of consumers treats urban planning not as a separate science

13:19from the other sciences devoted to human living, rather, urban planning subsumes those sciences. Contractors who otherwise arrange the details for water and electricity will just as easily provide still further coordinating services in tomorrow's free society. Their list of services may simply have to grow or a new subvocation of construction will develop with its own specialists. Another possibility are independent urban planners who work as consultants. That is, specialists who focus on land, utilities, transport and mini-coronation. But of course, just as with the state, such bodies, if too large or too prescribed, though free and voluntarily entertained, could encounter such impediments as the calculation problem, cultural incongruity, lack of spontaneity, and other weaknesses that will drive consumers to stronger competitors.

14:06The very genius behind freely based urban planning is that buyer's concerns must be met. There is a common fallacy held even by most advocates of laissez-faire that the government must supply police protection as if police protection were a single absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. This is precisely why state-run urban planning fails. Planning is not an absolute fixed quantity. Some neighborhoods will require litter to no planning, others will require extensive planning, intricate services to cater to the wishes of its consumers. One further benefit is the amelioration to NIMBY problems.

14:52Because most do not want to live near a strip club, at least they don't want to raise their family near one, or an airport or a garbage dump, the contractors will either have to shield their buyers through land use planning or negotiations with other contractors or some such thing in order to keep the peace in their neighborhood. Whatever the specifics, it is clear that a contractor and neighborhood association will have great incentives to provide these services. Currently, citizen's sole recourse is political action, a battle that consistently favors the privileged over the non-privileged and in no way rewards consumer preferences. Rather, it only benefits the state and its friends. Private planning accordingly will embolden a buyer such that he will not have to stand by helplessly as his neighborhood is infiltrated with such undesirable content.

15:45We have so far argued for the compatibility of, if not the inevitability of, urban planning within a voluntarist framework. It seems clear someone is going to have to make some of these decisions that urban planners currently take for themselves. It also seems clear that these decisions will tend to collectivize above the individual level, being organized according to neighborhoods or even small boroughs before hitting its natural organic limits of the commons. But perhaps one could object that we have simply defined away our problem, that what we're proposing isn't actually urban planning, it's just what contractors do, they build houses with amenities. Planning after all, as it is currently pursued, is an ostensibly sociological science. It takes a lot of pride in that. It is more than simply putting roads or houses here and there.

16:36It includes elements of architecture, culture, environmental concerns, and other issues of community design. We saw this exemplified in the New Urbanism Manifesto that was cited, planning aimed at sociological ends. Thus, one objection to what we have laid out is is that what we propose isn't urban planning per se and that therefore only a government really has the overarching reach to make planning happen. Well we don't think that that objection holds for two reasons. The first is that necessarily all planning decisions have a sociological impact. Just as you can't be kind of a coordinating contractor arranging quite a few services without also being a planner, you can't really be a planner without making what are essentially and these sociological decisions. Contemporary urban planning seeks to preserve local culture and prevailing sociology, often with a few nanny state improvements. But it has removed the power to do so from the individuals themselves, the way it's sort of worked up until the rise of the state. Planning, architecture and culture all came before the state. They often persist

17:43in spite of the state. And so there's good reason to think that it would flourish after The second reason is that we see a larger framework to free market urban planning than merely connecting garbage collectors with clients, or constructing enough parks per set of neighborhoods. Because planning necessarily impacts social conditions, there is an aspect to the science that must serve human beings' ultimate end of what Aristotle called eudaimonia, Human beings are what Aristotle calls the political animal that is a social animal, and as a result, we only find our fulfillment in connection with what he called the polis, or the community.

18:30The Aristotelian approach to praxeology tells us that society, that is, community, is a good to be pursued. It is not an arbitrary burden that can be easily rejected. This framework allows libertarians to go on the offensive with respect to many of the so-called commons objections that opponents of the free market site. This includes everything we have discussed from roads, parks, community shared goods and services, and fire and security protection and the like. But there is a wider implication to our argument than the mere fact of planning's compatibility with libertarianism. If it is the case that planning decisions cannot be sociologically neutral, then it follows that there is a proper science of urban planning to be pursued with the end goal of contributing to individual and social flourishing.

19:19There are some thinkers and authors who have begun this groundwork. Jane Jacobs, for example, critiques planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but the book contains a series of insightful observations on just how well-functioning cities accomplish important social functions. and Social Functions. To cite but a few examples, she explores how sidewalks reinforce bounds for privacy while also encouraging healthy relationships among neighbors and safely incorporating children into city life. She cites how cities organically promulgate diversity, mixed uses for buildings, and naturally tend towards the right balance of population density. Peter Gordon, a sociologist working at a USC, is another good example of someone doing this Now the majority of our examples lend themselves to imagery of new construction and suburbs.

20:13But the reality of urban planning in America today is that the greatest volume of work lies in already existing residential zones that need a lot of work addressing decaying inner cities and revitalizing failed planning districts. We maintain that, just as the state, through its urban planners, was the agent of destruction for American Cities, so also it cannot be the entity that brings renewal to the places that it has destroyed. And it is for this reason that a libertarian theory of urban planning and libertarian minded urban planners are essential components for a possible future of flourishing communities in America. Thank you.