A City Cannot Be a Work of Art: Sanford Ikeda on Jane Jacobs and Spontaneous Complexity

Landry Ayres: Our Centers of progress theme this week has revolved around the history and nature of cities and their role in promoting values central to free societies, including a respect for liberty, individual rights, free speech, and cosmopolitanism. But putting those values into action is much more complicated than it sounds. To find out how we can though, let’s explore the important distinction between design and spontaneous complexity today on the Liberty Exchange.

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Jonathan Fortier: I am Jonathan Fortier. Welcome to the Liberty Exchange. Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Sanford Ikeda, professor Emeritus at the State University of New York Purchase College. Professor Ikeda is formerly trained as an economist and has a deep knowledge of urban planning with a particular expertise in the work Jane Jacobs, a giant of 20th century theory of urban design, and how thinking about cities offers a particularly good avenue towards economic and social theory. Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities published in 1961, is still considered one of the great works about the uses and abuses of urban planning. My talk with Professor Ikeda explores how different approaches to the design and growth of cities can either enable or be intention with individual liberty and human flourishing.

Jonathan Fortier: Sandy is the author of Dynamics of the Mixed Economy with scholarly publications in the Southern Economic Journal, environmental politics, social Philosophy and Policy, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, cosmos and Taxes, 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, urban policy, and much more. Today, Sandy and I talk about his recent book titled A City Cannot Be a Work of Art, learning economics and social theory from Jane Jacobs, published by Paul Grave McMillan this October. Sandy, thanks for coming on the Liberty Exchange podcast.

Sanford Ikeda: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Jonathan Fortier: Our timing is fortunate in that you have just published a book of tremendous interest to us because it engages with so many themes relevant to free societies. But I would love to explore some of the major themes in this work and could perhaps begin with the provocative title, which you take from a quotation from Jane Jacobs. The title as a city Cannot be a Work of Art and the quotation is when we deal with cities, we’re dealing with life at its most complex and intense because this is so there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities, a city cannot be a work of art. Why did you choose that for the title of this work?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, well, thank you for reading that passage that comes from her, probably her most famous book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was published in 1961. And I thought that, that quote and that line, a city cannot be a work of art really captures the message that I wanted to convey in my book, and indeed in most of the writing I’ve done about cities in the last 20, 25 years or so. And if you think about a work of art as Jacob says, what an artist does is abstract from reality rather than try to create something that is real. An artist like an engineer is tasked usually with making something that is going to serve a particular function. And an artist in not exactly in those terms, but an artist in most cases anyway, there are certain kinds of contemporary art that maybe don’t fit this particular description of trying to achieve a particular end.

Sanford Ikeda: Today there’s a lot of processual kinds of art that depends on the interaction between the observer and the artist. But for the most part, they, and even in that case, artist wants to achieve a particular end. And to that extent, a work of art, like a piece of machinery or computer program, is very different from a social order because a social order has no particular end. And for me, what having read Jacobs, starting in the late 1990s, came to realize that a city is a, that kind of order, that kind of unplanned order, a par excellence, what a lot of social theorists today would refer to as a dynamic emergent order or a spontaneous order. So, and that is the sense in which a city cannot be a work of art to the extent that it doesn’t have a particular end or purpose in mind it serves like a market is there to serve the plans and purposes of many, many, many different people who are usually anonymous to one another except in small groupings. But yet somehow markets as well as living what I call living cities are coordinated and coherent in a way that doesn’t require planning, which I guess we could talk about in this conversation.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, I’m glad you raised this theme of spontaneous order. I’d like to return to that as a master theme shortly, because you explore that in very interesting ways. Perhaps early on, I’d like to just talk a little bit about your encounter with Jacobs. You provide a very evocative description of meeting Jane Jacobs in Toronto and that long 4-​hour conversation, or I guess it was perhaps even longer than that you had with her. And I was particularly struck with your description of her response to a question you had asked her. You asked her what she believed her main intellectual contribution was, and her response was economic theory. So many people that know Jacobs don’t think of her as an economist, but then you go on to describe her economic contributions. And I say many people I see… I’m thinking of people that encounter really her work on urban planning and don’t think very much about her other contributions. Do you wanna just say a little bit about that encounter with Jacobs and some of her economic and social theory?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, that was one of the peak moments of my life. I also had a peak moment when a friend of mine and I rode in a taxi with Friedrich Hayek [laughter] 15 minutes back when we were in graduate school. But this was close to four hours with Rich and Jacobs with a few other colleagues including Pierre DeRoche who was one of the people who got me interested in Jacobs and urbanism in particular, way back in the 1990s. Yeah, that was an amazing afternoon.

Sanford Ikeda: She had just completed her last published book, which is called Dark Age Ahead, and had just done her Canadian taxes, which was very fortunate for us because she never granted interviews while she was working on a project, and she seemed always to be working out. And so Pierre and his colleague from the Netherlands Gert-​Jan Hospers arranged that meeting and we talked about it just many different things, including as you point out her economics and her views on economics.

Sanford Ikeda: And yeah, she did assert that economic theory, economic development in particular are central themes for her. And if, as I explained in my recent book and elsewhere, that if you look at the… Just look at the titles of her major works, it’s obvious that economics is front and center in her thinking. But as also as you mentioned most people who are familiar with Jacobs, even very familiar with Jacobs, either aren’t aware or don’t fully appreciate her economics. One exception to this is her very close friend, colleague, Roberta Gratz, who coined the term living city that I use frequently in the book.

Sanford Ikeda: And she actually wrote a nice little blurb for the book appreciating the fact that I’m bringing out her economics. But for the most part, people who are fans of Jane Jacobs don’t know about her economics and her social theory. They know bits and pieces of it. They don’t see how it coheres. And and by the same token, most economists, if they’ve heard of Jane Jacobs, don’t really associate her at all with economic theorizing, with some major exceptions, which I know in the book, including Robert Lucas, who’s the Nobel Prize winner, Ed Glaeser, who’s a very well known urban economist from Harvard and others. So there are exceptions there as well.

Sanford Ikeda: But the point of the book, and indeed a lot of my writing is to make her insights, develop her insights and make her, make people aware of what they are her principles that helped to us really understand much better the economic and social processes in the world. And again the foundation for this, the social theory has to do with the limitations of individual knowledge, the despite that the conditions under which order emerges unplanned spontaneously.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. You make a very compelling case that Jacobs should be understood within the market process school that many people understand as the Austrian School of Economics, which is central to libertarian theory or classical liberalism. Do you wanna just say a little bit about why you see Jacobs working within this tradition, what the major components of her thought are, and how they are sympathetic to, or very similar to many of the market process thinkers?

Sanford Ikeda: First of all, in an early chapter of the book, I, Jill obliged to justify my assertion that she’s a significant economic thinker. So I argue that point by point, at least in my understanding of what economics is, how Jacobs checks off all these boxes for being an economist, including an understanding of how social order emerges and the presence of scarcity amongst myriad strangers, limited knowledge. But then I go further in that same chapter and early in the book and say, well, beyond that she is very close to market process economics. And this is the economics that derives from Colonel Manger, Rudric Ramisses, Rudy Hayek, Vis Kirzner as the major figures.

Sanford Ikeda: And I say that because while she is an economist in the sense that she, as I mentioned before, appreciates the function of markets, the importance of trade, her focus is not on efficiency. It’s not on what economists would call equilibrium and the properties of equilibrium, by which we mean states of affairs in which plans are fully coordinated, no one’s making any mistakes, or they have perfect knowledge, and so they are able to successfully plan with respect to other agents in a market. And Jacobs will have none of that because her focus is on change and innovation and the role of cities in that process of change and innovation. So change and innovation, discovery, as is occasional what our entrepreneurial discovery doesn’t happen, doesn’t need to happen if your information is sufficient or perfect to begin with. And so the very fact that she’s interested in change and social change and innovation it implies that the starting point of her social theories that, well, people are at least partially ignorant. And so there has to be some way, and people are… That’s true, people are partially ignorant.

Sanford Ikeda: And, but we do see living cities of innovation and order and so forth. How does that come about? Or how do you get this unplanned order largely unplanned? She’s not an anarchist, a libertarian anarchist or anything like that, but how do we get that unplanned order from this independent actions of myriad strangers who are strangers to one another and have limited and imperfect knowledge? So that’s the real connection between her understanding of economic processes, her interest in economics and her understanding of economic processes and the strong connections between that and market process economics, which I try to point out in my writings.

Jonathan Fortier: Do you think she saw efficiency as being intention with discovery or innovation or perhaps even mutually exclusive with it?

Sanford Ikeda: Yes. Well, because efficiency, strictly speaking, I mean, people use efficiency sometimes just to mean what I like. [laughter] That’s efficient, if I like it, that’s efficient. But economists and they’re being careful mean by efficiency, that you achieve a particular end with the means available at the lowest cost. So what that implies is that you know what end you’re gonna pursue, you know all the means available to you, you know the costs of those ends, and you know the benefit, assuming you know the cost of those means, and you know the benefit of the end. And so you choose that combinations of means to achieve that end, which will get you there at the lowest cost. So that’s efficiency. And Austrians or market process theorists criticize this because well, how can you assume that people have perfect awareness of the means available or even what ends that they want to pursue. This is precisely what Jacobs says.

Sanford Ikeda: I mean, she castigates microeconomics because of it’s focused on efficiency in this sense. She says somewhere the virtue of cities is that they are inefficient. Why? Well, because cities are places where people experiment, where there’s trial and error taking place, and you don’t, like, as I said earlier, you don’t need to experiment. You don’t need trial and error if you already know what it is that you want and the best way to get there. Some of my talks and to my students, they say, well when you graduate or when you go off to start your careers, you probably move from where you are living now in campus or your hometown to somewhere else to… And it’ll likely be a city.

Sanford Ikeda: And why do you do that? Well, because you think that there’s gonna be opportunity to do x, y, or Z. You wanna do something, you have an idea that you wanna go into arts or you wanna go into, you have a job in engineering or something. And I say, when you do that… And of course, you have a particular end that you wanna pursue. But once you get to a city to that location, you start working there, invariably you’ll discover, well, this may not be the best thing for me, there are other opportunities for me in this city to make I’m aware of. And so the ends that you want to pursue will change as you learn about the environment. And so similarly, the means how to achieve that end you’ll learn what they are, and you will experiment, you’ll try one job, you leave it for another one, and all this sort of thing.

Sanford Ikeda: So I say, well, wait a minute, why don’t you just choose the best job to begin with. Why don’t you choose a job that you’re gonna end up with and be your career right at the beginning? And so, like, are you crazy? You don’t know this sort of thing? How can you possibly know that? And I said, yeah, exactly. And Jacobs understood this. Jacobs said, well, the cities are incubators of ideas, big and small. They’re incubators of ideas in the sense that I was saying, and I was talking about jobs, but in the ordinary sense of the word. But people go to cities for many different things to escape where they are now, their current friends and family or whatever it is, or they wanna try new things. They wanna adopt a new identity, which is easier to do on a big anonymous city than it would be in a smaller settlement, smaller town. Anyway. So that’s the thing. Cities attract people who are searching, they retain people who are still searching and so forth. So the idea of innovation, trial and error, eliminating ignorance, discovery, it’s maybe not exactly using those terms, but they’re certainly central themes in Jacob’s analysis of living cities.

Jonathan Fortier: Well, this is a natural place to return to this idea of spontaneous order that you mentioned earlier. I like how you set up the book because you have these extended meditations really on spontaneous order. And then towards the end of the book, you talk about constructivist responses to some of the challenges in cities. So I think you’ve queued it up very nicely, your earlier sections think about the city as a spontaneous order in the same way that markets are a spontaneous order or language is a spontaneous order. Maybe you could outline some of the ways you think this operates and what the virtues and perhaps some of the negative consequences unintended consequences are of the spontaneous order. You frame it within trade-​offs. So I think that’s quite interesting you frame it within the context of there being limits, of course, to order and planning. And so how would you outline your thinking about this whole master theme?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, as I said earlier, Jacobs was not an anarchist, in the sense that she thought a lot of planning should be done by the government. Now I try to be a little more neutral with respect to who should do the planning. I think she understands that, we talk about most of the plans that do the heavy lifting in society are done by private individuals. We have our ideas about jobs and so forth, lifestyles. But she recognizes, and I recognize that if you’re going to have a city of… In today’s world, a major city is over a million people. And so what do you have? Well, you have infrastructure, you have roads, you have sewers, water supply, waste drivable, communication, so forth, power supply, transport. So in those infrastructural areas, you need to have planning and sometimes extensive planning at least over time. Again, there are examples today of private cities where that are not on the scale of, let’s say a million yet, but that, potentially could be depending on how they evolve in the future, but that are not centrally planned, at least for those particular things.

Sanford Ikeda: Let me just digress for just a moment. If you ask the question, how could a free market provide freeways that require eminent domain, that is the taking of private property for public use, how would the free market do that? I say, well, it couldn’t, at least not very easily, although historically, if you look at how, John Nash, not the economist, but the planner in London, planned roads, major boulevards on London, right? It was done privately, but for the most part, if you wanna theory talk about freeways, you can’t, right? Not it, not easily, or maybe not even feasibly, but if you ask the question differently, if you say in terms of capabilities instead of concrete elements, if you say, well how can you promote maximal mobility? Or how can you form optimal mobility?

Sanford Ikeda: So you phrase in terms of mobility instead of freeways. Then we say, okay, well there’s autonomous vehicles. There’s foot paths that you can create that will make accessible different kinds of land uses, bike path and so forth. Now, somebody has to create those bike paths, but that’s certainly on a different scale than a major concrete six or eight lane freeway going through a city and there’s air transport. Today, we have drones and things like that that are possible. Anyway, so that’s one point. Okay, that was my digression. I’ll get back to the main question about the trade off between planning and, deliberate planning versus spontaneous order. Let me just put it in terms of design complexity, because you can design things that are highly complex computer programs and so forth, or, an undesigned or spontaneous complexity, which are orders of magnitude much more complex.

Sanford Ikeda: A city is much more complex than anything that an individual mind or a team of individual minds could create for reasons that we can talk about, but might take a long time to explain. But these tremendous differences between planned and unplanned complexity. However, you do need to have some planned complexity. Let’s take roads, for example, however, or whoever implements them, whether it’s through a private development or through governmental planning. So you have to have some kind of transport system, mobility system. And let’s say that it’s planned in this way. There’s certain kinds of planning such as that, which to an extent initially compliments spontaneous complexity. That is, it offers a way for people to pursue their own plans successfully, more or less successfully. So in order to get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time, then you need to have some sort of infrastructure that will enable that to happen. Or you could say the same thing for the other thing, power, provision, sewage removal and so forth.

Sanford Ikeda: Moreover, you need to have some going beyond the physical. You need to have some rules that enable people to cooperate. And in our urban context, these are often rules dealing with spillovers externalities and that sort of thing. And so not burning garbage in such a way that’s going to injure neighbors and things like that. Okay? So these are negative externalities, and so you may have rules that forbid certain kinds of activities that would harm others, most likely harm others. But as Hayek points out, Friedrich Hayek, there are rules that are negative rules that forbid you from doing certain things. And that tends since rules tend to be consistent with the rule of law and classical principles that say, thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal from them thy neighbors.

Sanford Ikeda: Actually, I don’t think Hayek put it exactly in that, somebody else put it that way, but that forbid, but don’t accept an exceptional cases mandate. So you have what Richard Wagner puts in terms of Piazza versus parade. And Piazza is a place where it’s a, in a physical surrounding, which somebody built or was built over time by different people where you hang out, you interact, you play the guitar, you have dinner, you have conversations versus a parade where individuality of that sort is forbidden. You don’t have a marching band for example, where everybody can do what they want to and be a conventional march-​man.

Sanford Ikeda: The Stanford marching band back in the day, back when I was in high school, Stanford University used to have the same anarchistic kind of marching band, there was that and so was there’s always that. But for most part a marching band they individually goes out the window. You have to take so many steps forward turn a certain way, right? Uniformity is the norm. And so, any deviation from that is forbidden. So what is not mandated is forbidden. Whereas what Hayek is saying, and what Wagner is saying is that, well, if certain you have certain rules, don’t disturb the peace. Don’t play any music too loud or something like that. But anything else you can do, as long as it doesn’t harm anybody, right? This is sort of, I guess the million juster mill concept. So the extent that the infrastructure that you build enables people to pursue their own plans and it doesn’t encroach upon the potential for spontaneous complexity. That’s fine, right? You need those kinds of rules. You need those kinds of physical structures.

Speaker 1: But what happens invariably, and this particularly when government gets involved, because the government has a soft budget constraint through taxation and inflation of the currency. They get big. And so they expand beyond the realm, which would complement spontaneous complexity. And so it reduces spontaneous complexity. So at that point, there’s a trade off, okay? You wanna design something bigger for particular. For example, this would be a lot of cities that have sports stadiums, which are subsidized by the local government, either through issuance of bonds or domain often. So it’s private public. And these are popular way of building such things these days. And that creates problems for the surrounding area, which we can talk about later.

Sanford Ikeda: But what you’re doing is you’re building something that is, will be very difficult to change later, and very costly to change and excludes many, many possibilities for the use of that space granularity of uses for in that same space would severely diminish. Now, that’s sometimes unavoidable okay so you sometimes you need to build something that, that’s big. But the point is, you need to be aware that there is this trail. And so to the extent that you wanna build something even bigger, right? Be on a sports stadium like a city in Saudi Arabia, right? The Prince of Saudi Arabia is building this enormous trillion dollar complex, called Neom, N-E-O-M. Just look it up. And part of that is a linear city of 100 miles long and 200 meters wide, okay? If it is ever successful, will be a disaster. So that’s the extreme version of that in modern terms. And in the past we can look at designs of Le Corbusier and others. So yeah, so there’s that trade off that between design complexity and spontaneous complexity.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Much of what you have been describing with your references to Hayek and with Wagner and others, reminds me of Richard Epstein’s, the title of Richard Epstein’s book, Simple Rules for a Complex World. And what you seem to be describing is just that realized in urban form. In other words, there’s a simplified context or framework that can be designed, but the spontaneity emerges within that simple order, within that simple design. And if you overdesign the framework, then you overdetermine or try to overdetermine outcomes, and you risk creating spaces like the giant sports stadium, which has an intrusive and negative effect on spontaneity, if I understand you correctly.

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah. Again, sometimes these things are unavoidable, but an example, locally, I live in Brooklyn. They built a basketball arena for the Brookline Nets and okay, fine, build a basketball arena. But what happened to the original plans is that in addition to the basketball arena, the city was gonna enable them to build a housing complex, office complex. And this thing just kept growing and growing and growing. Now, it hasn’t expanded to that level ’cause there’s so many legal disputes. People sued to prevent this from happening and which delayed the project for many years. But anyway that’s an example of the dynamic that occurs once you have these very soft budget constraints. I should say one more thing about planning. I, was it Mike Tyson who said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Sanford Ikeda: So [chuckle] that’s beautiful. So you plan something and it doesn’t work out, right? So it’s necessary to be flexible and adaptable. And in general, the smaller the scope of your plan, right? Who it affects, how many it’s gonna affect, and the complexity of design. The specificity that is of the things that you want to take to happen. The smaller, that is. The, in general, the easier it is to adapt and to change, right? Both the scale of the project and the complexity of the design of the project. But what happens is that when you build these public projects and public private partnership projects, the scale and the design expand enormously so that the ability to adapt to changes, well, first of all, the ability to discover that you’re making an error diminishes, right?

Sanford Ikeda: And then if you do discover how to change it. It’s not only, so that’s just a matter of awareness. And that awareness diminishes as the scale and the design elements increase. But then also the cost of changing those plans increases enormously. Which is why if you’re gonna build something on that scale and you have ambitions to build it with certain design elements of all, I’m not an architect, I’m not an urban planner, but the lessons that I learned from social theory is that the slower you can feasibly go in doing that, more gradually you do it, the easier it is then to change direction as you go along. One example of this, I think it’s very good, is in New York, this Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, which took years and years and years to complete. Which is I think finally completed, well some time ago. But it took a couple of decades, I think to… Because they were designing it modularly and they were adjusting over time. It’s actually a very nice, in my opinion, very nice, area. Not just aesthetically, but what’s going on there, the things that, the kinds of uses and productivity that’s happening there.

Sanford Ikeda: So it’s not always possible to build gradually or modularly. And so, you need to think twice about that because the investors want returns right away. Engineers think that, well, you should build the entire system at once that’s cheaper than going small and small. And that’s all true. That’s all true. But from a socioeconomic perspective, that is the impact on the greater economic and social order. This sort of gradual growth and modularity to the extent that it’s feasible is probably more desirable.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. Another phrase that is used interchangeably with spontaneous order is emergent order, and it sounds like this is a development that’s trying to model that ethic, isn’t it? That developing something over time organically, and as you say, checking progress and changing course as needed depending on changing circumstances sounds much more friendly to innovation and learning from mistakes than imposing a top-​down centrally organized plan from the get-​go and executing it.

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, if you can build that into the design, make it flexible physically to adapt to different things. Or if you allow already built physical structures like schools, universities to adapt to changes, the multiple use over time or at a given time, which you can do, right? You can do that through changing changes in zoning ordinances and other things of that nature, legal regulations to enable flexibility of use, division of space into smaller or larger spaces as need arises. Then that’s another way of adapting in a given circumstance.

Jonathan Fortier: So with these ideas in mind, how would you think about an urban landscape like Manhattan, which at first glance looks like a highly designed urban space set up on a grid, but perhaps that’s just a framework within which lots of spontaneity can occur? What are the limits really of design that enable sufficient spontaneity and human freedom and innovation? Would Manhattan be an example of that, or would that be an over-​designed space, would you think?

Sanford Ikeda: Well, the grid of Manhattan, which was sort of echoed in the other boroughs as they became part of New York City, was designed by a committee in the early 1800s, 1810, 1811. The book called City on a Grid, this author escapes me, but the book is titled City on a Grid, which is really interesting ’cause the history of that Manhattan grid and what preceded it. There were private firms in lower Manhattan, which estates, I should say, large estates where the owners of those estates had actually planned their own grid, which is different from the commission, the governmental, the state government commission grid that eventually came out.

Sanford Ikeda: And some of that is still visible today. So your question is the trade-​off there. So what the commissioners did was to lay out a map. Now, at that time, in 1811, most of Manhattan was not developed. It was inhabited sometimes by Native Americans and others and so forth. But the principal area of development in 1811 was below 14th Street. So those of you who don’t know Manhattan, Manhattan goes up to the 200s. Okay now. So they were planning for the future, and they had a certain idea where streets, north-​south streets and the north-​south avenues and east-​west streets should go. And those who were gonna develop had that as their framework, as a matrix in which to do… And there was no zoning at that time, at least not as we have it today, certainly. So you could do whatever you wanted to in those plots.

Sanford Ikeda: Now, if you’re a developer and you wanted to buy land, a certain number of these blocks, you could certainly do that. And the fact that the grid was there made selling those plots easier because you could see. You could divide up each plot, each block into several plots. And you knew the streets were gonna go there. And so that certainly did facilitate development.

Sanford Ikeda: So, that’s the kind of planning that I referred to earlier as, for the most part, enabling and complementing spontaneous complexity, which is not to say that the grid as designed and as eventually implemented… By the way, it’s different now than it was. It did adapt from the way it was originally planned. But it’s not to say that that’s the perfect, that was the best that they could have come up with. I think there were better ones. And I think the book that I mentioned, City on a Grid, talks about alternatives that might have occurred. Now, nevertheless, as I said a moment ago, the possibility for adaptation was still built in because not all of Manhattan… This was a grid laid out on most, as I said, mostly undeveloped land. So there was no Central Park church temple. That’s probably the biggest example. Also, Broadway in Manhattan runs diagonally across the island and basically from the southeast to the northwest. So, it cuts through. And there was really no provision for that initially, which is nice. I’m sorry. The fact that it’s there is really nice because some of the most interesting intersections in New York occur where that diagonal cuts through the grid.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. Even if it upsets sort of Cartesian sensibilities.

[chuckle]

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. Yeah.

Sanford Ikeda: And you could tell another story, a similar story about the New York City subway, which was begun in 1904 and, well, I maybe a little bit earlier than that, but it was really got going in 1904 and was planned out in a certain way, which was private companies, by the way. But no one in 1904 or 1920 or 1930 could have predicted, well, maybe by 1930, but let’s say 1920 could predict exactly what the system would look like. I corrected myself because by 1940, the system was pretty much frozen. And there was no new subway line, no significant new subway line until just a few years ago.

Jonathan Fortier: So the history of New York is fascinating. And I’ve always thought of it as an interesting example in this discussion of spontaneous order versus design and how we think about the trade-​offs between the two. Clearly, Jacobs thought that there was a problem with urban planning as she saw it in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She begins with this incredibly pointed and provocative sentence. She writes, this book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. And you have a discussion of that. What do you identify as Jacobs’ principal concerns? And do you agree with her concerns? Or do you have different concerns about the way cities are planned or over-​planned, centrally planned?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, and I would just add that the second sentence after the one you just read says, it is also and mostly an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding. So, a lot of libertarians neglect the second sentence and just focus on the first. And so I think it’s important to address both of them, but to address the first part of the attack on city planning. I mean, there are many specific examples of this having to do with building of highways and parks and housing projects that Jacobs had in mind. And in the context of New York City, this is mostly focused on the planning commissioner, Robert Moses, who is also very famous or infamous in the world of urbanism and urban planning. Not everybody just likes him, but I think the general feeling is that he was kind of a bad guy. There’s actually a couple of plays that have been out about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.

Sanford Ikeda: But anyway, so those are specific examples, parks, highways, and so forth, that were mis-​planned, but they are manifestations of a deeper social theory. And that is the neglect that individuals that are being affected by this have knowledge of their environment, which is not available to the planner. So, this is what Jacobs calls local knowledge or locality knowledge. Hayek uses the term local knowledge, Jacobs talks about locality knowledge. And this can be partly communicated to the planner, but not wholly, but either for reasons of epistemological reasons, not able to convey information or just through arrogance, the planner is neglecting.

Sanford Ikeda: So that the beginning of her 1961 book, Death and Life in Greater American Cities, starts off about sidewalks. Maybe the first few chapters are about sidewalks, the uses of sidewalks, contact, children, so forth. And that’s a brilliant way of starting because it gets at this fundamental point of social theory, the principle that is people, if you’re going to plan, you need to observe and to think about how people are actually going to use the space. How are people using the space that you’re trying to change? First of all, is the end that you’re trying to impose, whether it’s faster car transport or whatever it is, environmental concerns, sustainability, whatever the end, she didn’t talk about those things, but those are concerns today.

Sanford Ikeda: Whatever that end is, see what people are actually doing. In other words, there’s a deep respect that Jacobs had for the knowledge and resourcefulness of ordinary people. So what a market process economist might call methodological individualism and methodological subjectivism. That is, understand that social orders are made up of the choices of individuals, that’s methodological individualism, and that these individuals have perceptions and perspectives on the world in which they’re occupying, the part of the world that they’re occupying, and that’s methodological subjectivism.

Sanford Ikeda: And then how those things interact or generate an overall pattern of use in that neighborhood or in district or in the city as a whole. And that’s what a market process economist would call the principle of market processes, or in this case, urban processes. All right. So that’s what she is fundamentally in terms of social theoretic context, that’s what she’s attacking, that a lack of appreciation for the knowledge, expectations, resourcefulness of individual people, and the limitations of the planner in accessing that knowledge. Okay. So to the extent that you can’t access that knowledge for, let’s say, epistemological reasons, then you probably should think twice about doing that. Because unless you actually go there, go to that street, go to that neighborhood and see how it is, then you’re not going to really appreciate what it is you’re trying to plan for.

Jonathan Fortier: Right. Was this the ballet of the street that she, as she described it?

Sanford Ikeda: Yes. Yeah. And again, that’s the street ballet is an example of the spontaneous order, how people use public spaces different times of the day for different purposes, which is not a result of anybody’s planning. The other phrase that is popularized from Jacobs is Eyes on the Street, Eyes on the Street. And that’s a very good expression, not only for her urbanism, but also for again, what market processors so called methodological subjectivism that you people are perceiving things in their environment, which right or wrong, they make mistakes, but in general, under the right conditions enable them to successfully execute their plans.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. She seemed to be extremely interested in sort of the granularity of life, the details of life, and had a real respect and love for humanity and individuals, the way they live their lives. That’s how it comes across. Yeah. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Soviet planning of urban spaces. That, as you know, often involved destroying old medieval city centers and building these large, concrete housing developments that would now house the people in the brave new world of the collectivist society. So, it seemed to be driven, obviously driven by ideology. And you point out that Jacobs was sort of anti-​ideological. She was stridently trying to avoid being ideological and trying to develop her theories, not necessarily in an ideological vacuum, but by observing what was happening in, on the street as opposed to coming to the problem with a preconceived set of ideas.

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah. As you say, she was fiercely opposed to being connected with any ideology, whether it be classical liberalism or Marxism, and believes strongly in observation. And she called herself a pragmatist. And so that goes back to what I was saying earlier about, and if you’re gonna plan, you should go and look for yourself and see, look at the granularity and the details of these different environments that you wanna plan for. And you mentioned the Soviet experience. She actually has comments in her later books about Soviet central planning that are very consistent with the criticism of Moses and Hayek. But what, she was, I don’t actually put it quite this way in any of my writings, but now that I think about it, which she is really criticizing is arrogance and hubris, right?

Sanford Ikeda: And promoting humility. I remember Hayek in his Nobel lecture talked about, I think it was this Nobel lecture time coping with ignorance. And when one understands social orders, you understand that you have to be modest in which you want to do with respect to the social order. And I think that’s just precisely what Jacobs has attitude was, right? Not that you shouldn’t do anything, but, you should do, you should approach complex social order, first of all, by understanding that it is complex and then looking at the details, how it actually operates, which may not be the same from one place to another. So there’s, that’s your pragmatism, right? There’s an empiricism that in her approach that is fundamental.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, it’s fascinating, set of ideas here that intersect with questions of freedom almost everywhere. Perhaps we could wrap up with sort of a meditation on some of the constructivism that you raised towards the end of your book, which is a obvious counterpoint to spontaneous order. Where do you see some of the worst excesses of constructivism when it comes to urban planning? And how do you think that that has exerted a cost or a toll on human prosperity or human flourishing?

Sanford Ikeda: I mean, the sort of the classical ones I’ve mentioned, Le Corbusier and the Radiant City, Ebenezer Howard, garden City, Frank Lloyd Wright concept of Broadacre City and others, right? Those, but those are some of the more famous ones. More recently, what I tried to do earlier in the book is to point out that while large scale urban planning is not popular in North America today, it’s alive and well in other parts of the world. And I mentioned a moment ago what’s going on in Saudi Arabia. I could talk about the United Arab Emirates, Dubai the Palm cities, the palm developments that they’re trying to implement there. But also in Asia, China’s ghost cities, these enormous settlements that they’re, well, there’s no waste. Well, they’re called ghost cities, because at least for now, they’re not inhabited for the most part. Some of them are successful, but for the most part, they’re not. These are large settlements that are intended to…

Sanford Ikeda: Have about a million people in them or more that, and then there are dozens of these being built in China and for various reasons. I mean, I guess, people think of, well, you need to depopulate cities, which is sort of the old early 20th century idea of you gotta get people out of cities because cities are these terrible places. But also I think it has some macro, in China has some macroeconomic motivation, make work for construction, so it’ll boost the apparent ghostmistic product and so forth. So those are some that exist today. And then those are large scale examples. There are smaller scale examples that one can point to. But there’re also developments today in the smart city movement, the free city movement that are smaller, tend to be smaller in scale and much more market-​based, much more consistent with classical liberal principles that are encouraging. There aren’t any of these that have matured into what I would call real cities. That is to say, cities where there’s innovation creation of new ideas and and so forth. But they are encouraging.

Jonathan Fortier: There are cities that have rather relaxed regulations on zoning, for example, I think Houston is one of them where people are permitted to have mixed use construction and mixed use throughout the city, if I’m not mistaken. Is this one way of dealing with the problem of overly determined or constructivist approaches by simply relaxing zoning regulations or relaxing other sorts of regulations that perhaps are not necessarily connected to the particular design of the city, but have to do with a whole array of other institutional restrictions on the way the space is used?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, I mean, what makes the city a living city, or I think one, a livable city as most people would regard it, is what happens on the street level. What you feel and see at the street level. And what Jacobs points out and I totally agree with her on is this granularity of land use different uses within a given stretch of street. What kinds of things would attract you, or are there to attract you? You know, rather than a whole block being one use, whether it’s a university or factory or something like that, which again, sometimes you have to do this. But there are those trade offs we talked about that manifest themselves. So you find this, if you can find a way to promote that kind of granularity then you’re going to enable people to pursue these different uses.

Sanford Ikeda: And on their own, you don’t have to tell them, okay, you may have regulations that, as I said earlier would ban noxious uses or things like that. And they’re different ways of doing that. They’re better and worse ways of regulating those sorts of things. But that that is something that would emerge over time spontaneously and that, so, designing a city and trying to incorporate that kind of spontaneous granularity is I think, literally impossible. And so if you’re gonna try to design an entire city, like beyond the line, you’re not gonna have that spontaneous complexity. Impossible. Right. It’s not something you can design from the beginning comprehensively. Or at all. So anyway, that’s the… I think that’s the objective here, really for most urbanists is not a city is a work of art, but a city where people can find spaces that appeal to them individually.

Jonathan Fortier: And pursue their own idea of a meaningful life. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that’s a wonderful place to leave the conversation for now. Sandy, your book is so rich and covers so many different themes that we may well have to have you back on to talk about some of the other ideas that you explore. So many of them intersect with our concerns here at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. And I think would make for a series of great conversations. Is there anything you’d like to say in closing as we wrap up this conversation?

Sanford Ikeda: Yeah, I think, my book, The City Cannot be a Work of Art: Learning Economics and Social Theory from Jane Jacobs published by Paul Grave, McMillan [laughter] Is no substitute for reading the, Jane Jacobs’s own work. And I say that throughout my book this is not a Jane Jacobs for Dummies, right? It’s my interpretation. So I think if you’re interested in what we’re talking about today, what I’m saying you need to read Jacobs. I guess start with Death and Life of Great American Cities read all the parts of it, not just the first part, which some people do, read all of it. And there’s so many examples. I mean, the examples, some of them are dated. This a book that’s over 60 years old now, but and it’s still full of insights that will allow you to see the world around you in a fresh way.

Sanford Ikeda: I’ve taught my course on city’s culture and economy purchase over 20 years. It’s one of my most popular course, maybe the most popular course that I teach. And it’s because I think it changes people just by reading Jacobs. It changes the way people perceive their surroundings. I mean, it could be an office, it could be their house, it could just be the street looking what it is. How to look at your social environment. The Jacobs is one. Christopher Alexander is another one. I mean, they’re a whole bunch of things that the authors, I should say, that I cite in my book. And hopefully people are interested, will pursue.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, you have a very rich bibliography and footnotes throughout the work. So, we will provide a link to your book which has just come out this autumn. And we will also include some references to Jane Jacobs’s work and to some of your other articles and books as well. So Sandy, thank you very much for your time. Much appreciated.

Sanford Ikeda: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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Landry Ayres: Thank you for listening to the Liberty Exchange, a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. This episode was hosted by Jonathan Fortier and produced by Landry Heirs. Special thanks to Sanford Ikeda and the rest of the lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org team, including Pericles Nikos, Paul Meany, Alison Yaffe, and Grant Babcock. If you liked this and want more, visit us online at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.