[43] in libertarians
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (damartin@mtl.mit.edu)
Sun Jul 3 20:12:56 1994
Reply-To: damartin@mtl.mit.edu
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 1994 20:10:08 -0400
From: damartin@mtl.mit.edu
To: libertarians@MIT.EDU
>Anyway, there some majors here at MIT (and elsewhere as well) that
>might lend themselves to certain political leanings. Every time I
>go to my office I pass by the sign for majors of: "Urban Studies and
>Planning" a related field to aritechture here. One assignment they
>had (I saw some winning models) was to design and plan the "best use"
>for some city in Japan.
>I mean, after the first few assignments the professor would probably
>get tired of my solution: a blank piece of paper saying only "let the
>property owners decide." The very question itself: "how would you
>plan the city?" is based in a statist premise of property ownership.
Not necessarily. I grew up in Reston, Virginia, which was a
planned town. A guy named Robert E. Smith decided where everything
would go BEFORE building any houses, roads, etc. Then he (I think Gulf
Oil was involved also) bought a large tract of land and started
building houses and selling them. Before buying any land, house, etc.,
you were told about all of the various restrictions. If you didn't
like them, you were free to live somewhere else. It turned out well,
and Reston is a very nice place to live. (In fact,. I am wearing my
Reston T-shirt right now.) It is one of the few planned towns that was
financed entirely by private interests. As long as it is all run by
private interests, and as long as they tell you beforehand about the
land use restrictions and give you the option of living somewhere
else, I don't have a problem with it. So, there are ways for city
planning to be useful without violating libertarian principles.
-David Martin
