Wednesday 17 September 2014

Oh Christchurch, revisited

My chapter on the failures in the Christchurch rebuild is up at Public Address.

I'll be speaking on it at a lunchtime panel tomorrow in Wellington. Perhaps I'll see you there.

From my chapter:
If we learn anything from the intersection of the work of Jane Jacobs and of Ed Glaeser, it’s that cities are organic. The best parts of cities emerge from the distributed decisions of thousands of property owners, building near each other to take advantage of complementarities in location that they could foresee and that the planners couldn’t envision. SimCity takes no account of the wishes and dreams of the Sims. All of the small actions of distributed individuals can add up to something wonderful, if only Council and the bureaucrats would get out of the way and let it happen. Instead, we had the worst of all possible worlds: the insistence that a perfect central plan supercede these decentralised decisions, but absolutely no bureaucratic capacity to set or follow through with a plan.

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