Zach Caceres over at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom has penned a rebuttal to a critic, called “In Defense of Urban Life“:
Urban life brings people together for mutual aid, and it opens wealth-generating possibilities for specialization and trade. It can integrate otherwise contentious groups, and it melds culture together to bring about beautiful new hybrids of music and art. We shouldn’t write off cities because of a romanticized ideal of the pastoral.
Indeed. There’s more and it’s a good, brief apologia for the urban environment versus the un-urban (suburbia, rural, pastoral, wilderness) in terms of satisfying human needs and lifestyle preferences. He touched on it briefly but I believe it bears further emphasizing, much of the problems his critic and those like him cite about urban environments are caused by central planning and non-market regulation.
Pollution, economic exploitation, environmental degradation and destruction (a poorly defined term for an ill-premised concept, but even accepted at its face in this situation it makes some sense), resource “overuse”, all of these problems are caused by undefined or poorly defined property rights and arbitrary interference and dictates from governments and other political, non-market institutions.
The solution to society’s economic ills are free markets. And the solution to society’s habitat ills are free cities. More of the current paradigm of Ponzi city construction based upon uneconomic, unproductive government infrastructure, city service and land-use planning will surely doom us all. But free cities, organized voluntarily by the participants and outcomes of local and international free markets, are just as surely the salvation, offering nearly limitless density, technological innovation, economic opportunity and variety in lifestyle.
Imagine the high rise urban wonderland of New York City meeting the honesty, productivity and heroic excellence of Galt’s Gulch.
That’s the way forward.
A House Rises 