Market Urbanism
Although I had been consumed with my work recently, I still had time to keep tabs on the blogosphere. LIke many of you, I have a laundry list of blogs from which I receive feeds. Relative to my interests, it has been easy to discover those covering design, architecture, and urbanism. On the other hand, it has been difficult to discover blogs that keep my interest when pertaining to economics. That was, however, until I discovered Market Urbanism.
[Image: Graphs illustrating hoarding as a consequence of rent control. Courtesy of Market Urbanism.]
Adam, author of Market Urbanism, writes the following introduction…
In this blog I intend to introduce free-market thought to urbanists, and introduce urbanism to market advocates. I also hope to incorporate some ideas relating to environmentalism in the built environment. I like to refer to the connections between free-market economic thought, urbanism, and environmentalism as “Market Urbanism.”
Through my personal inquiry, I have concluded that free market advocates and urbanists actually share many objectives. Growing up in suburban Chicago, I felt there was something inefficient about the land patterns and tranportation of the suburbs. When I discovered urbanism in freshman architecture/planning coursework, it made sense. However, I became conflicted between my urbanist instinct and my free market instinct. Through study and practice of building and infrastructure design and construction, economics, planning, development, and urban economics I came to the realization that our problems with sprawl, congestion, and automobile dependency were the result of socialistic economic planning of our transportation system and land use, not due to market failures as many urbanists proclaim.
He appears to have a reverse track – going from architecture to economics, whereas I started in economics and moved to architecture – but this makes his content accessible and relevant to architects and urbanists. After only reading through a small chunk of the content he has managed to amass in a relatively short time frame, I quickly became hooked on two series he has started.
- Urbanism Legends – intended to dispel economic myths about policy and land development
- Rent Control – a 4 part series that highlights the seen, unseen, and ignored implications of rent control, with the final part offering potential solutions for its elimination
His writing is clean, thoughtful, and very convincing. The idealist in me, as we all architects are, has a hard time buying every concept and opinion he introduces. Regardless, he begins useful debates and provides informed arguments.
I encourage you to add this blog to your preferred rss provider, as I hope to contribute to his discussions.
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Comments
Thanks for the kind words about Market Urbanism. I am glad you found it informative. At the least, I hope to open dialogue between economics-types and planners/architecture-types. We all have much to learn from each other.
This is my first time on your blog, and intend to check it out. Meanwhile, I will add your blog to my blogroll.
Adam
Market Urbanism
[...] blog, Agents of Urbanism recently gave praise to Market Urbanism. Thanks Matthew! Please check out Agents of Urbanism and Life Without Buildings, which followed up [...]
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Very interesting post, thanks for saving. This brings me to 30 blogs and counter for Planning, Architecture and Design