Freedom, creativity and the future of cities

City, knowledge, creativity, entrepreneurship, prices, economic calculation, speculation, corruption, cartesian order, spontaneous order, developed or contractual law, customary law and urban planning.

What will the cities of the future be like? This is a question that does not have an unequivocal response. The cities of the future will be developed by people who have not been born yet or who are not devoted to shaping urban planning policy and markets. Furthermore, these cities have not yet been created and will be created thanks to a knowledge that does not yet exist today. All we can do is try to draw along the general (alternative) guidelines according to which those future cities might be constructed and the consequences of every alternative. This work tries to analyze the main problems caused by today’s urban planning models and its results. Later we will try to explain the different general policy frameworks used to develop urban areas. Finally, we will offer a figure of the type of urban development and the economic consequences of every alternative. In this final step the author will analyze the scope that is granted to human creativity and social cooperation in each case.

Procesos de mercado: revista europea de economía política, Vol. 9, Nº. 1, 2012, págs. 51-71