Cities and Private Planning: Property Rights, Entrepreneurship and Transaction Costs

Through comprehensive case studies of privately planned cities and neighborhood 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 under-studied 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.

Contributors: N. Alfasi, D.E. Andersson, W.E. Block, E. Buitelaar, W. Cox, F.E. Foldvary, M. Galle, P. Gordon, R.G. Holcombe, L.W-C. Lai, A. Lowi, S. MacCallum, T. Margalit, S. Moroni, R. O'Toole, S. Rajagopalan, N. Sorel, A. Tabarrok

Edited by David Emanuel Andersson, Professor of Management, IBMBA Program, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan and Adjunct Professor, International School of Management and Technology, Feng Chia University, Taiwan and Stefano Moroni, Professor of Planning, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Italy