Now that most cities are getting overcrowded around the world and the trend will continue, it would be advisable to create new cities. But apart from China, no one in either the developing world or developed world is building cities.(AGW mongers perhaps?)
Ideas on how we can do it better than today, keep the government at bay for the most of it but still create a beautiful inhabitable city?
Cities arise out of the actions of people - not the other way around. Beautiful Cities are not an end but a means of cooperation between individuals. I suppose if a group of liberty people ended up in the wilderness, they could start building. The problem is they’d be under the jurisdiction of the current county, state, country.
If you’ve read any of Dr Hoppe’s work, you may believe that perhaps this “independent city-states” concept is the ideal non-threatening secession condition.
I find Ideas like Patri Friedman’s Seasteading interesting as well.
In terms of economy of capital investment, the best place to build a city is always where there already is a city. That is why cities tend to remain where they are for thousands of years.
You can’t plan a city. At best, we could start some kind of town somewhere relatively free of government intervention and hope for the best.
I have a friend employed as an Urban Planner. She once told with with a totally straight face that “in theory” New York City cannot work. It should collapse. And “in theory” cities with a population of over 1 million should not work either.
I told her that obviously the theories were wrong and the large cities were “right”. But luckily for us most Urban Planners are employed to make small areas more enjoyable and are not responsible for creating cities.
cities generally initially arise around natural resources (such as a natural chokepoint like a port, or around actual raw resources such as mines etc), as they grow they gain new value in the form of the density of population and labor that allows the divisin of labor to start increasing efficiency.
Look at the genesis of a new company for a microcosm of the division of labor. At the start a couple founders can do everything (sometimes poorly). As they grow they can afford to have a seperate person for more and more tasks.
ha ha ! priceless, your friend sounds like she lies awake thinking about bumblebees…
(im sure she’s a lovely person aside from this)
Did she specify what theory she was invoking?
No..thank god we do not use endnotes and citations in our casual conversations. I just took her word for it since she worked for an urban planning wing of an architecture firm and I did not..
And she does not spend her time thinking about bumble bees. She spends her time thinking about how to encourage clients to remove those ugly metal spikes that are designed to prevent people from sitting while still discouraging spontaneous hobo jamborees.
I imagine that if they were given responsibility for creating cities, their theories about sustainable populations would quickly become reality.
Hmm… I wonder if that qualifies as a vindication.shrugs shoulders
lol, how about ‘pretty’ metal spikes ?
Europe figured those out centuries ago. Keeps kids out as good as barbed wire fencing. Ideal in revolutionary settings.
I don’t think cities would ever have gotten as big as they are without the government making the homesteading of unused land virtually impossible, and making development of settled land so damn hard and expensive.
I would say that yes, it is time to have some more cities. Lots of small cities, instead of a couple hundred freaking HUGE ones. But that’s not going to happen so long as the government exists as it does today. Cities will go on becoming crowded, and most of the unused land will go on being unused. “Urban sprawl” will occur in fits and starts, growing existing cities until the coasts are gigantic, filthy, noisy, crowded metroplexes, and the inland areas will remain largely uninhabited.
Much in the same way that the Soviet Union had more giant nails and screws than they could use, whilst tractors rusted by the thousand as the people starved. The centralization (and subsequent mismanagement) of infrastructure is 100% the effect of government central planning.