Property Rights, Planning and Markets: Managing Spontaneous Cities

Book Description
This book represents a major innovation in the institutional analysis of cities and their planning, management and governance. Using concepts of transaction costs and property rights, the work shows systematically how urban order evolves as individuals cooperate in cities for mutual gain. Five kinds of urban order are examined, arising as cooperating individuals seek to reduce the costs of transacting with each other. These are organizational order (combinations of property rights), institutional order (rules and sanctions), proprietary order (fragmentation of property rights), spatial order and public domain order. Property Rights, Planning and Markets also offers an institutional interpretation of urban planning and management that challenges both the view that planning inevitably conflicts with freedom of contract and the view that its function is a means of correcting market failures. Real life examples from countries and regions around the world are used to illustrate the universal relevance of theoretical generalizations, which will be welcomed by a new generation of policymakers and students who take on a world view that goes beyond national boundaries.

About the Author
Chris Webster, Professor of Urban Planning, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, UK and Lawrence Wai-Chung Lai, Professor of Economics, Planning and Law, Department of Real Estate and Construction, University of Hong Kong


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Webster (urban planning, Cardiff U., Wales) and Lai (economics, planning, and law, U. of Hong Kong) explore the strengths and weaknesses of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to city planning in cities and systems of cities that have recently adopted capitalism and are struggling with a culture of welfare statism and a sense that old forms of government no longer work. They argue that state and markets co-evolve, complementing each other and discovering by trial and error better ways of distributing responsibilities. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


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