A City Cannot Be a Work of Art

Front matter

A City Cannot Be a Work of Art

“Sanford Ikeda made two unique contributions in his book. First, it provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for Jane Jacobs’ observations about more livable cities; second, it makes a convincing assessment of the significant impact of Jane Jacobs's ideas on modern urban design and planning. Ikeda reminds us, however, that if Jane Jacobs won the battle against Robert Moses, the struggle continues between two different concepts of cities: top-down technocratic city planning as opposed to a recognition of cities as the emergence of spontaneous

order as described by Jane Jacobs.”

Preface

Studying the writings of Jane Jacobs has enriched my understanding, as an economist, of the social cosmos. When I met the great urbanist in 2004, I was already integrating her singular insights into my teaching and professional writing. Sadly, she died two years later. While our personal connection was regrettably brief, my appreciation for her ideas has continued to deepen.

Around ten years ago, I began to think seriously about putting down, in some reasonably coherent form, what I have learned about economics and social theory from Jacobs and passed on to my students. Which is how this book came to be written. But the only good reason to add to the plethora of books out there about cities is to contribute something interesting, important, and new. I believe this book meets that challenge.

Purchase, NY, USA Sanford Ikeda

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making and has had many helping hands along the way. Accordingly, I express my profound gratitude to those named below for substantially contributing to its inspiration, development, and completion. Some names appear more than once because they have aided me in multiple ways. The usual caveat applies.

I begin by thanking Peter J. Boettke and Pierre Desrochers for prompting me to think deeply about cities in the first place and Walter Grinder for his unflagging enthusiasm and frank encouragement from the very beginning of this project until his recent death. Emily Hamilton lent careful and efficient research assistance in its early stages And Francis Morrone has long been a source of inspiration for all things architectural and urban.

The following individuals, organizations, and institutions provided venues for valuable feedback on various chapters of the manuscript or versions thereof: David Schmidtz, Mary Rigdon, and the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona; David Emanuel Andersson and Cosmos+ Taxis; Anna Sachko Gandolfi, Arthur Gandolfi, Carolyn Greaige, and the Economic Freedom Institute at Manhattanville College; Larry Reed and the Foundation for Economic Education; Janet Bufton, Matt Bufton, Sabine El-Chidiac, and the Institute for Liberal Studies; Yukihiro Ikeda and Keio University; Mark Pennington, John Meadowcroft, and Kings College London; Stefano Moroni, Stefano xi xii Acknowledgments

Cozzolino, and Politecnico di Milano; Peter Gordon and the School of Planning at the University of Southern California; Paul Mueller and The King’s College; Gabriel Calzada Alvarez, Roberto Quevedo, Pablo Vasquez, and the Universidad de Francisco Marroquin; the Association for Private Enterprise Education; the Association of Schools of European Planning; the Mont Pelerin Society; the School of Urban & Regional Planning at Reyerson University; and the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics.

The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University sponsored an intensive two-day workshop for an earlier draft of the manuscript in November 2020, and I am truly indebted to the organizers, Greg Walcott and Stewart Robertson of the IHS, and to the participants who each read and commented on the entire manuscript. The latter included Alain Bertaud, Stefano Cozzolino, Pierre Desrochers, Edward Glaeser, Peter Gordon, Roberta Brandes Gratz, M. Nolan Gray, Sonia Hirt, James Jacobs, Vera Kichanova, Michael Manville, Sam Staley, and Joanna Szurmak.

The members of the Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes at New York University have in recent years commented on several draft chapters. I would especially like to thank Mario J. Rizzo, David Harper, William Butos, Young Back Choi, Luc Marest, J. Huston McColloch, Raoul Oreskovic, Maria Paganelli, Nathan Goodman, Justus Enninga, Otto Lehto (particularly for written comments on Chap. 9), and Alexander Schaefer.

Kaveh Pourvand organized a day-long workshop on the manuscript in October 2022, sponsored by the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, that gave rise to many constructive criticisms from the participants who, in addition to Kaveh, included Janet Bufton, David E. Gordon, Andrew Humphries (particularly for extensive written comments on Chaps. 1, 2, and 5), Rachel Humphries, David Schmidtz, and Adriana Zuniga (particularly for written comments on Chap. 8). My heartfelt thanks to them all.

Marion Duvall of Palgrave Macmillan supplied the professional support, patient advice, and much-appreciated flexibility needed to move the manuscript to publication. My talented niece, Chieko Kagiyama, rendered all the illustrations with accuracy and alacrity. And I am deeply

Acknowledgments xiii grateful to my wife, Jennifer Wada, for her steady encouragement over the length of this project and for her expert editorial assistance and comments, having gone over every word of the complete manuscript often more than once. I am also grateful to my son, Christopher Ikeda, for just being who he is.

The recommendations from everyone vastly improved the final version of this book. I was able and willing to incorporate a great many of them, but any errors or omissions that remain are alone my responsibility.

I thank Purchase College, SUNY, for granting leaves and release time from teaching; the Charles Koch Foundation for summer support in 2017; and the Earhart Foundation and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University for their backing early on. And I gratefully acknowledge receiving direct support for this project from the Institute for Humane Studies under grant no. IHS017036.

My gratitude and love to the decades of undergraduates who passed through my course “Cities Culture & Economy,” from whom I have gained so much. I hope the feeling has been mutual. Finally, this book is dedicated to Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud, who have given generously of their vast knowledge and dear friendship to Jenny and me.

About the Book

Jane Jacobs is a legend in the field of urbanism and is famous for challenging and profoundly influencing urban planning and design. This book is about what we can and should learn from Jacobs's contributions to economics and social theory, which are central to her criticisms of and proposals for public policy, but frequently overlooked even by her most enthusiastic admirers. It argues that Jacobs's insight that “a city cannot be a work of art” underlies both her ideas on planning and her understanding of economic development and social cooperation. It shows how the theory of the market process and Jacobs’s theory of urban processes are useful complements—an example of what economists and urbanists can learn from each other. This Jacobs-cum-market-process perspective offers new theoretical, historical, and policy analyses of cities, more realistic and coherent than standard accounts by either economists or urbanists.

Contents

1 2 3

An Afternoon in “The Annex”

Encountering Jane Jacobs

Part II Diversity, Social Networks, and Development

The Paradox of Urban Diversity and Cohesion 1 Microfoundations of Jacobsian Economics 1.1 What Does “Diversity” Mean? 1.2 The Generators of Land-Use Diversity 1.2.1 Two or More Primary Uses 1.2.2 Population Density 1.2.3 Short Blocks 1.2.4 The Need for Old, Worn-Down Buildings 2 Re-Thinking Jacobs’s Four Generators of Diversity 2.1. Re-thinking “Mixed Primary Uses” 2.2 Re-thinking “Short Blocks”

Contents

2.3. Re-thinking “Old, Worn-Down Buildings”

2.4 Re-thinking “Population Density”

It Is the Interaction of These Factors That Generates

Diversity

3.1 Diversity and Resilience

3.2 Safety and Diversity

How the Market Process Solves Jacobs’s Problem of

Diversity and Cohesion

4.1 Markets Turn Diversity into Complementarity

4.2 Entrepreneurship Is a Coordinating Force in the Market Process

N

Cities and the Market Process

1.1 Entrepreneurship

1.2 Extending the Boundaries of Market-Process Economics

Action Space and Social Networks

2.1 The Nature of Action Space

2.2 Density, Distance, and Structure

2.3 Population Density Versus Network Density

2.4 The Importance of Network Structure

2.5 Social Distance, Strength of a Tie, and Diversity

“Jacobs Density”

Connected or Trapped?

4.1 Norms

4.2 Trust

4.3 The Dynamics of Action Space

4.4 Behavioral Trust

4.5 Freedom and Competition

4.6 Unintended Consequences

Implications for Urban Design: Fostering Social

Capital in Action Space

5.1. The Design of Public Spaces and Social Capital xix

110 113

114 116 117

120 122

124 126 127

131 133 135

170 71

XX Contents 5.2 Border Vacuums, Cataclysmic Money, and Visual Homogeneity Again 6 Concluding Thoughts Works Cited

NWR WN

4 8

Cities and Economic Development

The Problems of Discovery and Diffusion

Solving the Problems of Discovery and Diffusion

Economic Freedom and Social Networks

The Process of Innovation: Parent Work and New Work

Economic Development via Import Replacement and

Import Shifting

6.1 ‘The Division of Labor as a Spontaneous Order

6.2 Innovation as a Process of Import Replacement and Shifting

6.3 A Digression on Tariffs

6.4 The Inefficiency of Economic Development

The Self-Destruction of Diversity

Part III Planning and Revitalization (and a Coda) 1 Urbanization and Its Problems

2 The Constructivist Response: Large-Scale Approaches 2.1 Constructivism and “Cartesian Rationalism” 2.2 Kindred Spirits 2.3 The Consequences for Urban Design

3 Constructivist Theories of Urban Planning and Design

4 Classic Examples of Cartesian Planning in Practice

172 173 174

179 180 183 189 193 194

197 197

199 202 204 205 208 209

Contents

Urban Interventions That Jacobs Criticizes

1.1 Functional Zoning

1.2 Rent Regulation and Inclusionary Zoning 1.2.1 Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning 1.2.2 Voluntary Inclusionary Zoning

1.2.3. Other Problems with Inclusionary Zoning

1.3 Housing for Low-Income Households 1.3.1 Jacobs's “Guaranteed Rent” Method for Subsidizing Housing 1.3.2 The Need for “Substandard” Housing 1.4 The Housing Problem Is Historically a Poverty Problem but Has Lately Become a Policy Problem Market Urbanist Critiques from a Jacobsian Perspective 2.1 Building Codes 2.2 Mobility 2.3 Urban Sprawl 2.3.1 Sprawl, Historically Considered 2.3.2 Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater- Zyberk: “New Urbanism” as a Response to Sprawl Policies Critiqued from a Purely Market Urbanist Perspective 3.1 Government-Sponsored Community Participation 3.2 eee n

3.4 re h en neti

4 Concluding Thoughts Works Cited

Broader Conceptual Lessons and Necessary Elaborations

1.1 Planning for Vitality

1.2 O-Judgments Versus S-Judgments xxi

272 274

275 279 279 281 283 285

287 292

292 295 298 300 302 304

309 310

310 313 xxii Contents 1.3 Governance Versus Government 1.4 Kinds of Rules and Their Enforcement 1.4.1 Rule of Law and Negative Rules 1.4.2 Nomos and Thesis 2 Jacobs and Market Urbanism 3 Cities of the Future 3.1 Urban Revitalization 3.1.1 Shared Streets 3.1.2 Sandy Springs, Georgia 3.1.3 Cayala, Guatemala City 3.2 City Building: Charter Cities and Startup Societies 3.2.1 Charter Cities 3.2.2 Startup Societies 3.3. Other Examples of Startup Societies 3.3.1 Gurgaon, India 3.3.2 Dubai, UAE, and Neom The Line 4 What Then Might a City Be?

Works Cited 10 Coda 1 Elements of Jane Jacobs’s Social Theory 2 Elements of Jane Jacobs’s Economics 3 Elements of Jane Jacobs’s Public Policy 4 Looking Ahead Works Cited Appendix to Chapter 5 Appendix to Chapter 6 Appendix 1 to Chapter 9 Appendix 2 to Chapter 9 Index

About the Author

Sanford Ikeda is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Purchase College (SUNY). He is the author of Dynamics of the Mixed Economy, with scholarly publications in The Southern Economic Journal, Environmental Politics, Social Philosophy & Policy, The American Journal of Economics & Sociology, Cosmos+ Taxis, The Independent Review, Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, and The Review of Austrian Economics. He has contributed entries for The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism and has published essays in Forbes and National Review Online. His research focuses on the interconnections among cities, spontaneous social orders, entrepreneurial development, and urban policy.

xxiii

List of Figures

Space-order matrix

Scale-complexity trade-off

Spontaneous complexity—designed complexity Network A

Network B

Network C

Example of Jacobs Density (JD)

Example of increasing Jacobs Density

Example of strategic ties to increase Jacobs Density