On January 15th, 2018, Startup Cities hosted a discussion panel featuring Adam Hengels, founder of Market Urbanism, and Patrik Schumacher, Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects. Hosted by Peter Ryan, Founder of Startup Cities.

This episode features the full audio recording of this event, plus Anarchitecture Podcast’s pre-game and post-game discussion.

Use hashtag #ana018 to reference this episode in a tweet, post, or comment

View full show notes at https://anarchitecturepodcast.com/ana018.

Intro

  • Introduction to the event and participants
  • We’re the color commentary; Market Urbanism is the play-by-play
  • A chance to connect with Market Urbanism, and reconnect with Patrik Schumacher
  • Tim’s impressions of the event
  • Summary of topics covered
  • Audio quality – remember that our policy is to blame the listener for any and all audio quality issues. You’re just not listening hard enough.
  • YouTube slideshow of notes summarizing the discussion: https://youtu.be/ujq1WGri4wA

Startup Cities Event Audio

Peter Ryan

Mission of Startup Cities: Bring investors and entrepreneurs from startup community to urban planning, real estate development, and architecture communities

Startup Cities sponsors

40% of buildings in Manhattan could not be built today with current zoning requirements

Patrik Schumacher

Biography

Was a communist as a student

Became more mainstream

Re-radicalized in libertarian thought and Austrian economics after 2008 financial crisis

Adam Hengels

Studied Architecture in college, then switched to Structural Engineering

Graduate school at MIT for real estate development, focusing on mega-projects

Worked for a developer on large projects (Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, now Pacific Park)

Long-standing interest in urbanism

Saw what happened behind the scenes between government and developer (subsidies, eminent domain)

Also saw negative impacts of NIMBY groups

Adam Hengels

Sprawl is not a free-market phenomenon, it is government-created

Steven Smith and others started writing for Market Urbanism

Market Urbanism is a movement

Planning intelligentsia has started to come along. They admit that zoning is a problem.

Next step is closing the gap between the intelligentsia and the mainstream

Patrik Schumacher

Left-liberal consensus runs deep among intelligentsia

Peter Ryan

Did you (Patrik) perceive these ideas before 2008?

Patrik Schumacher

Was exploring other ideas about societal organization

Fordism – 20th century – Simpler industrial base and societal organization – more compatible with modernism

Post-fordism – More complex economic and societal organization – more urban concentration

Managed, state-run economy and development – a bad but viable idea in the 1950’s, a suicidal idea today

Peter Ryan

Increased urbanism isn’t a decision people are going to make, it is going to happen.

What role does market urbanism play in this inevitable development?

Adam Hengels

The future is a world of agglomeration.

People want to be around other people

The great ideas of the future are going to happen in cities

Patrik Schumacher

Cities create the conditions under which productivity can soar and flourish

People are willing to give up 80% of their salary to be in the city center and participate in the city network

Living in the city is a socio-economic necessity, but urban life is also desirable

The city is a prosperity engine

Zoning and standards (i.e. housing) prevent people from making life choices. One-size fits all restrictions.

These regulations prevent affordablility. Talking about this topic is viciously toxic

Adam Hengels

There are also environmental consequences of planning regulations.

San Francisco is one of the most environmentally friendly places in the world to live.

The more we prevent people from living in San Francisco, the worse for the environment.

Peter Ryan

How do planning regulations distort what the architect does?

Patrik Schumacher

Regulations stifle innovation and creativity for architects and developers

Everything is predetermined

Entrepreneurs compete only on the basis of negotiating with authorities, rent-seeking

Basically there’s no market in real estate. That’s why it doesn’t function

These (negotiations with authorities) are invitations for corruption 

Adam Hengels

Architects don’t design buildings in NYC, zoning does.

90% of what you do is just compliance.

“Planners” isn’t the right word. They’re not planning, they’re reacting.

Petty bureaucrats

Patrik Schumacher

Creativity comes through loopholes

London developer building 500 bedrooms around one living room

China – creative, counterintuitive developments

The profession becomes boring and stifling

Creativity has to start with entrepreneurial developers’ creativity.

Adam Hengels

Developers have been trained to be compliance machines

To be creative, find a loophole

Adam Hengels

Parafin – Artificial intelligence platform that uses generative design and parametric modeling to rapidly generate optimized buildings.

Rather than wait weeks for architects to turn around a handful of options and then run cost analyses, Parafin generates millions of design options with cost analysis within minutes.

Patrik Schumacher

Research project to use parametric modeling to evaluate complex campuses

Adam Hengels

Computational analysis of development and design rather than relying on entrepreneurs’ and architects’ intuition

Patrik Schumacher

The city is the best place for discovering synergies

We love that chaos, liveliness, diversity, mixity of uses

The city is all about coming together, connecting up networking for synergetic activities

Freedom of uses is necessary for cities to self-organize into complex, navigable places

Architect gives shape and expression to this to allow people to find places and each other

It shouldn’t be a city sliced up into individual blocks and cells, it should be very open

Inter-visibility and awareness. Multiple levels, dense, and organic

Adam Hengels

Cities as a rainforest – unplanned order and synergy

Patrik Schumacher

Bottom-up order

Identity and coherence, navigable

Garbage spill urbanization – cities all look the same

Multi-species ecology generates character and order. Rule-based, not random

Bottom-up forces need to be free to give shape to their environment

Question from audience

For a private, city-scale developer, it may be optimal for planning to take place. With no plan, cost of starting is much higher.

How do you balance the costs and benefits of planning in private development?

Patrik Schumacher

London’s great estates – large parcels of land were planned

Planning as curation

Curation needs to go by something

It can be experimental and competitive at different scales

Allow for something new to emerge – more anarchic and chaotic

Adam Hengels

Planning has to happen at some level

Plan synergies of the private developer

Need to have flexibility in the long run

Need to recognize that cities are an emergent order

Question from audience

Should we get government out of the business of insuring risky lending?

Should we restrict certain types of building, i.e. in watersheds? 

Adam Hengels

In 2008, big banks should have failed.

In favor of not building in a watershed, but its a question of how you do it – with the heavy hand of government, or some other mechanism?

Patrik Schumacher

In a scenario where everything was privatized, owners of water resources would secure the benefits of long-term preservation and profitability of the resource.

Self-regulation

Individual land-owners could come together and organize

Built environment is complex, lots of externalities. It’s more politicized than some other industries (i.e. fashion).

There are entrepreneurial and market solutions

Question from audience

What is the most difficult city you’ve ever worked in, and why?

Adam Hengels

Worked in NYC and Chicago, studied in Boston.

Cambridge, MA may be more difficult than NYC.

Chicago is a free market paradise compared to New York, but it’s far from free in reality.

Patrik Schumacher

More dense, mature, and wealthy places are slower

When you add a new piece to this context, you have to be sensitive

This is made difficult by planning restrictions on improvisation

A lot of value is destroyed by things not happening – projects rejected, postponed, or cancelled

The land value that planning approval adds (to existing land values) has shot up in London from 50% of GDP to 200% of GDP

Adam Hengels

What’s the longest time one of your projects has been tied up in approvals?

Patrik Schumacher

In Italy, the government changed ten times during the course of a project.

What should have taken 3-4 years took 11 years.

Question from audience

California senator Scott Weiner introducing a bill (SB 827) to supersede local planning restrictions around transit. Resistance is from homeowners and incumbent developers. What is the market urbanism answer to removing power of homeowners rather than bureaucracy?

Adam Hengels

That bill (SB 827) looks awesome. If you’re a certain radius from a transit station, the local governments cannot impose height restrictions below a certain amount, cannot impose density restrictions. Opening a good dialogue.

Why are we preventing people from living in transit-served locations, because there are incumbent homeowners who don’t like it?

Question from audience

What is the market urbanism answer to removing power of homeowners rather than bureaucracy?

Patrik Schumacher 

I don’t think homeowners should necessarily have this power to prevent development in one area.

There’s no fast and ready formula that defines what is infringement on someone else’s property.

Preventing new building that doesn’t affect someone else’s property, just affects someone’s feeling, is too much protectionism.

In markets you don’t prevent someone from opening a firm and competing with you.

There needs to be a political debate about the kind of rules that should be acceptable.

NIMBYism is the force behind the politics. That sense of entitlement needs to be broken.

Political discourse shouldn’t always lead to majority voting on everything. 

YIMBY proposal in London to have people collectively agree to allow increased density on their streets.

Question from audience

Smart Cities – Are data-driven tools for cities dangerous munitions, or will they help planners do a better job?

Adam Hengels

There’s a potential for both

Empowered with better information, in theory they should make better decisions 

But that information could be released to the public or open-source so everyone can make better decisions

Patrik Schumacher

It should empower private planners.

It’s not only an information problem, it’s also an incentive problem.

In political processes, the feedback is very coarse and crude – bundled into 4-year elections with everything else.

Market urbanism gives voice and empowerment to everybody.

Information is often lacking, governments often have counter-incentives for applying the information.

Question from audience

European cities appear as green, new urbanism paradises.

Is “going green” another layer of regulation, or does it help to further the main goals of a city as the interaction between people?

Patrik Schumacher

One-size-fits-all rules of energy conservation make little sense

Incentives to save energy should be in the market. Eliminate subsidies.

I believe carbon trading is an interim measure.

Improve walkability of cities. This kind of greening would be synergetic and congenial to a privatization effort.

There could be some kind of collective action underlying this, but the political process is very slow (decades).

Adam Hengels

If government is going to talk about the environment, it should start by stopping doing the things that they’re doing that are hurting the environment.

Stop subsidizing the automobile

Stop building all these damn highways

Stop war

Before you tell someone else what to do, you gotta have virtue yourself.

Question from audience

Hudson County NJ has half a million people. What prevents it from being the core of an independent city as opposed to a bedroom community that sends commuters to Manhattan?

Adam Hengels

It doesn’t have the agglomeration that Manhattan does

Zoning policies may prevent increased agglomeration

Question from audience

The title is “Startup Cities,” which presupposes cities getting started.

How many of you in the audience have actually attempted to start a city?

Learn about what it takes to incorporate a city, it’s not as hard as you think.

If you were able to incorporate a city, you would be able to set up a planning and zoning board (not that you should!)

But you could craft planning boards that could be more friendly to the ideas presented here.

For a “city-preneur,” what sorts of things should they be looking at when starting a city from scratch?

Adam Hengels

The first question is why. Why are you starting a city?

How and why are people going to come together?

I’ve become more humbled that we could or should be starting cities from scratch.

Start small, with some economic reason.

Patrik Schumacher

In most of these private city projects, it’s not only a new city, it’s a new society.

Its a libertarian project of a more free market driven society.

Existing cities are politically captured.

Since the whole world is so politically stifled, a private city could create incentives as a free economic zone to draw people.

Would try to avoid zoning functions / uses. Allow speculation of uses.

Could have a sounding board advising.

Try out as much freedom as possible and do not be paranoid about freedom and what could come out of it.

Peter Ryan

The largest tax contributor in Florida, Disney World, was a startup city.

Interesting to look into the dynamic of how they bought the land, worked with the state, and developed legal systems that were customised for themselves, zoning regulations, building codes, were tailor fit.

While floating islands in the Pacific are a good bar to reach for, there are plenty of examples of private cities in the past that we can go back to.

Adam Hengels

Website: marketurbanism.com

Twitter: @marketurbanism

Facebook

A new non-profit organization – The Center for Market Urbanism

Nolan Gray is head of policy and research

Events – Foundation for Economic Education FEEcon this summer in Atlanta. Patrik will keynote the Market Urbanism track.

A collaborative book project summarizing the policies of Market Urbanism.

Patrik Schumacher

Giving a lecture tomorrow at the National Arts Club

Talking about architecture and societal progress

The built environment as ordered social processes

The city as a text, a system of signification, etc.

Website – www.patrikschumacher.com

Facebook

YouTube

Talking about free market urbanism, also illustrating the history of urban development through various stages of socio-economic development

Peter Ryan

Startup Cities

Website: startupcities.co

Hashtag #startupcities

Post-Game Discussion

  • Joe’s impressions of the event
    • Seething envy
    • Nothing ever happens in Australia
  • The growing impact of Market Urbanism
  • Parafin – AI powered development modeling
    • Joe’s household budget spreadsheet has become self-aware
    • When is a computational approach best suited to the project?
  • One-liners
    • “They’re not planning, they’re reacting”
    • “Gaming the planners” – a recipe for corruption
    • It’s not rule of law, it’s rule of men
  • Would NIMBYism be worse under private ownership of public space?
    • Home Owner’s Associations (HOA’s)
    • Density entices development of amenities and transit
    • NIMBYism is a symptom of government-induced sprawl
    • Increasing urbanism is an inevitable trend, not the result of a vote
    • The inherent bias in favor of incumbent homeowners under democracy
    • The opposite incentive could be the case under private cities
  • Curation
    • Allowing more organic entrepreneurial devlopment
    • Pruning and weeding
    • Curation by dispute resolution and pre-emptive public fora
  • Scott Wiener’s SB 827
    • Upzoning Beverly Hills
    • The state government as a check on local government overreach – are anarchists ok with this?
  • Startup Cities – Literally!
    • Cities as an entrepreneurial venture
    • Innovating cities
    • Do cities need to be grown organically, or can they be created from scratch?
    • Seasteading
    • Liberland
    • Economic freedom can provide the seed of a successful city – Hong Kong, Singapore
  • Post-event activities and name-dropping
  • Market Urbanism started as a blog, is becoming a movement

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