Through comprehensive case studies of privately planned cities and neighbourhood in Asia, Europe and North America, this book characterizes the theoretical basis and empirical manifestations of private urban planning. In this innovative volume, Andersson and Moroni develop an understudied aspect of urban planning and re-evaluate conceptions of our urban future. Urban planning is often construed only as a form of public planning. This misinterpretation is revealed through an empirical focus on how cities have been planned in the past and how the capacity of private actors will shape planning in the future. Private planning is responsible for most small-scale infill developments, ranging from single-family housing to hotels. However, examples of non-governmental actors that plan larger areas, such as homeowners' associations in the United States and private cities in India, are becoming manifest. Private urban planners are guided by price signals to supply infrastructure and regulations that make land more valuable. Using analytical tools from theoretical traditions such as Austrian and new institutional economics, the contributors to this book eschew the mainstream assumptions that underlie much of the critique of profit-seeking entrepreneurship among urban planners, sociologists and geographers. This volume will be invaluable for urban planners. Economists in a variety of fields will also be interested in the diverse application of economic theory, including applied urban economists, Austrian economists, new institutional economists and public choice economists.
Contents: 1. Private Enterprise and the Future of Urban Planning Stefano Moroni and David Emanuel Andersson PART 1: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES 2. Cities and Planning: The Role of System Constraints David Emanuel Andersson 3. Towards a General Theory of Contractual Communities: Neither Necessarily Gated, nor a Form of Privatization Stefano Moroni 4. Governance by Voluntary Association Fred E. Foldvary 5. Private Urban Planning and Free Enterprise Walter E. Block 6. Community Technology: Liberating Community Development Alvin Lowi and Spencer MacCallum 7. Planning by Contract: Two Dialogues Lawrence Wai-Chung Lai PART II: CASE STUDIES AND POLICIES 8. Modern Cities: Their Role and Their Private Planning Roots Peter Gordon and Wendell Cox 9. Houston's Land-Use Regime: A Model for the Nation Randal O'Toole 10. Lessons from Gurgaon, India's Private City Shruti Rajagopalan and Alexander Tabarrok 11. The Rise and Fall of Growth Management in Florida Randall G. Holcombe 12. The Public Planning of Private Planning: An Analysis of Controlled Spontaneity in the Netherlands Edwin Buitelaar, Maaike Galle and Niels Sorel 13. The Challenge of Regulating Private Planning Initiatives Nurit Alfasi and Talia Margalit Index
