Christopher Whipple wrote:
> On Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 12:57 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>>
>> ### Gee, I really, really hate urban planning. It's the enemy of the
>> past, present, and future.
>>
>
> Care to elaborate a bit more on this, Rafal? I had never given much
> thought to urban planning before reading a few of Jane Jacobs' short
> books - and a book called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants,
> Brains, Cities and Software - which, curiously enough, seems to draw a
> lot from Jacobs' work.
>
> I've lived in NYC for roughly four years now, and I didn't think much
> of the inner workings of the city before reading the above books. Now
> it all interests me very much, so I'm interested to hear your take on
> urban planning. Moreover, the parallels that can be drawn between
> city life/urban planning and loftier subjects like complexity theory,
> super-organisms, also interest me.
>
### I might be guilty of some hyperbole there. I agree that it is reasonable
and proper to try to predict the urban future and offer the citizens plans
they might use to shape their decisions.
I am quite upset, however, with the way specific urban planning features
(including zoning laws, and building codes) are forced on citizens by
municipal, and other governments. Basically, owners of land can be at any
time assailed by an edict saying their garden shed cannot be bigger than 100
sq.ft., or that the wiring in their house must be armored. Such laws in most
cases serve mainly to increase the relative influence and power of the petty
bureaucrats administering them, often with an arbitrary *esthetic* basis,
and restrict the owner's ability to quietly use and enjoy his property.
Many municipal decisions regarding e.g. maximum occupancy of tenements are
disguised attempts at keeping rents artificially high, to prevent the influx
of unwanted poor people. Rules prohibiting subdivision or prescribing a
minimum square footage of new buildings are meant to maintain a high tax
base with low number of inhabitants, and lower need for services (= more
cash left for the local big man).
I could go on and on. Municipal governments are just as destructive as the
federal and state entities. Their power should be drastically curbed, and
replaced with landowners and tenant's associations, where civil contract law
would be the way of dealing with your neighbors, instead of the
expropriation of everybody by everybody else that is going on now.
This said, I do like the idea of municipal governments providing basic
research data and consensual guidance to the above-mentioned small
neighborhoods.
Rafal
Received on Thu Oct 17 21:58:34 2002
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Sep 08 2003 - 11:37:39 CEST