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Store: An Independent Institute Book
THE VOLUNTARY CITY
Choice, Community, and Civil Society
Edited by
David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, Alexander T. Tabarrok
Foreword by
Paul Johnson
Historically, the city was considered a center of commerce, knowledge and culture, a haven for safety and a place of opportunity. Today, however, cities are widely viewed as centers for crime, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, traffic, pollution, and other social ills. In many cities, government increasingly dominates life, consuming vast resources to cater to special interest groups. Decision-making has become intensely politicized, bureaucratic, and largely unaccountable to the populace.
The Voluntary City assembles a rich history and analysis of private, locally based provision of social services, urban infrastructure, and community governance. Such systems have offered superior education, transportation, housing, crime control, recreation, health care, and employment by being more effective, innovative, and responsive than those provided through special interest politics and bureaucracy.
The Voluntary City reveals how the process of providing local public goods through the dynamism of freely competitive, market-based entrepreneurship is unmatched in renewing communities and strengthening the bonds of civil society.
A refreshing challenge to the orthodoxy that government alone can improve community life, The Voluntary City will be an essential reference for anyone interested in the future of cities, including scholars and students, policy-makers, civic and business leaders, and urban citizens.
Detailed Summary |
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University of Michigan Press Table of Contents
Foreword
Paul Johnson
Introduction: Towards a Rebirth of Civil Society
David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, Alexander Tabarrok
Part I. BUILDING THE VOLUNTARY CITY
Chapter 2: Laissez-Faire Urban Planning
Stephen Davies
Chapter 3: The Private Places of St. Louis: Urban Infrastructure through Private Planning
David T. Beito
Chapter 4: The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods? The Turnpike Companies of Early America
Daniel Klein
Chapter 5: Entrepreneurial City Planning: Chicago’s Central Manufacturing District
Robert C. Arne
Part II. Law and Social Services in the Voluntary City
Chapter 6: Justice Without Government: The Merchant Courts of Medieval Europe and their Modern Counterparts
Bruce L. Benson
Chapter 7: The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Stephen Davies
Chapter 8: “This Enormous Army” The Mutual Aid Tradition of American Fraternal Societies Before the Twentieth Century
David T. Beito
Chapter 9: Medical Care through Mutual Aid: The Friendly Societies of Great Britain
David G. Green
Chapter 10: Education in the Voluntary City
James Tooley
Part III. The Voluntary City and Community
Chapter 11: Proprietary Communities and Community Associations
Fred E. Foldvary
Chapter 12: Contractual Governments in Theory and Practice
Donald J. Boudreaux and Randall G. Holcombe
Chapter 13: Privatizing The Neighborhood: A Proposal to Replace Zoning with Private Collective Property Rights to Existing Neighborhoods
Robert H. Nelson
Chapter 14: The Case for Land-Lease versus Subdivision: Homeowners’ Associations Reconsidered
Spencer H. MacCallum
Epilogue: Market Challenges and Government Failure: Lessons from the Voluntary City
Alexander Tabarrok
Index
Praise for The Voluntary City “The Voluntary City is, in several respects, a big book. It is also an important one. The key question is the optimal mode of provision of a whole range of ‘public’ services, including housing, transportation, education, medical care, police and law courts. This book may lead to a reconsideration of how these services might be better provided through voluntary, market-based arrangements than by the ministrations of urban planners and other experts of the modern welfare state.”
—NATHAN ROSENBERG, Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr. Professor of Public Policy, Department of Economics, Stanford University
“The exciting and pioneering book, The Voluntary City, sketches out a provocative vision for communities based on civil cooperation and entrepreneurship. Drawing upon a fascinating history of city innovations, the book shows why the de-bureaucratization of urban life is crucial to fostering thriving markets, vibrant neighbors and educational excellence. A book worth reading.”
—JERRY BROWN, Attorney General of California; former Mayor, City of Oakland; former Governor of California
“This important book, The Voluntary City, tells how civil society was once able, through voluntary associations of like-minded and like-occupied people, to provide public goods that in recent generations have become increasingly subject to governmental initiatives and governmental regulation.”
—HAROLD J. BERMAN, late Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University
“This provocative book reexamines the history, contributions, and policy implications of nongovernmental agents in constructing cities and services including housing, health care, police, turnpikes, and education. . . . Many case studies raise interesting questions about the successful vernacular development of neighborhoods and group projects. . . . As we debate urban solutions involving new relations of public and private, as well as competing interests in changing U.S. cities, these essays provide challenging arguments. Recommended.”
—CHOICE
“The Voluntary City explores the fascinating history of bottom-up approaches to the challenges of urban living. It provides refreshing counterpoint to the dominant urbanologist tradition, which stresses the indispensability of government engineering of basic city institutions.”
—ROBERT C. ELLICKSON, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law, School of Law, Yale University
“The Voluntary City focuses on the extraordinary variety of ways that non-governmental institutions have collaborated to meet social and community needs. The authors demonstrate in compelling fashion that the private sector has historically provided a broad range of what we traditionally think of as ‘public services.’”
—LEE P. BROWN, Mayor, City of Houston, Texas
“The Voluntary City is an important book that demonstrates how private institutions are uniquely effective in addressing the needs of communities. It is highly informative for anyone interested in urban life and human welfare.”
—BERNARD H. SIEGAN, late Professor of Law, University of San Diego
“The Voluntary City is a superb book that examines how we can build better communities through expanding ‘civil society,’ the voluntary arrangements made among free people, instead of being controlled by orthodox power politics.”
—BRET SCHUNDLER, former Mayor, Jersey City, New Jersey
“The twenty-first century may become known as the time non-profits began to regain their civic responsibilities, even as the welfare state began to shrink. This prospect should give much food for thought to the imaginative donors who make nonprofit entrepreneurs possible. In The Voluntary City, writers look to the past—in particular, to Victorian society—to see what non-profits were able to accomplish before the emergence of the welfare state. . . . The Voluntary City reminds us that studying nonprofit history is important for donors. By examining the inventiveness of nineteenth-century nonprofits, we are reminded that even with such complicated problems as health care and crime, there may be alternatives to state measures—if only the private sector is permitted to exercise its creativity.”
—PHILANTHROPY
“Beito, Gordon, and Tabarrok have put together an outstanding book with The Voluntary City.”
—WILLIAM A. FISCHEL, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College
“The Voluntary City is a fascinating book in that it challenges many conventional paradigms on the urban economy and on provision of public goods. It brings together original material from both the U.K. and the USA on early ways of executing governmental competence.”
—PETER NIJKAMP, Professor of Spatial Economics, Free University, Amsterdam
“Those of us concerned with the role of government, particularly on the local level, have a great deal to learn from The Voluntary City. The central questions about how we can best build community and provide for a better quality of life—and whether these objectives are best accomplished inside or outside of government—are addressed here in a way that will stimulate a crucial dialogue.”
—ROSS C. “ROCKY” ANDERSON, Mayor, City of Salt Lake City, Utah
“I've already found myself reaching into The Voluntary City to make use of the detailed historical research. Finally, here are some solid case histories revealing how mankind has often gotten along just fine without massive government bureaucracies taking down reports on our burglaries, telling our doctors what treatments they could offer and how much they must charge, and pretending to teach the children to read. Here is a book that would revolutionize the public debate on a score of issues of the day ... if only the bulk of our government-school graduates were still literate, of course.”
—LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
“One might think that cities are not the place to find free markets, private property, and voluntary transactions. That is not the case, however, as The Voluntary City aptly demonstrates time and again. In fifteen excellent essays, various writers tackle issues in which problems faced by individuals in a community have been solved by individuals in a community have been solved through voluntary private cooperation. . . . The Voluntary City is must reading for those who champion not only private enterprise, but also a free society. From private arbitration to private police to communities that operate essentially under private law, these essays demonstrate that a voluntary society not only works, but prospers.”
—THE FREEMAN About the Editors David T. Beito is Associate Professor at the University of Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin in 1986. Professor Beito is the author of Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression and From Mutual Aid to the Welfare state: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. An urban and social historian, he has published in the Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of Urban History, among other scholarly journals. He is currently writing a biography of Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a black civil rights pioneer, entrepreneur, and mutual-aid leader.
Peter Gordon is Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and in the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. Professor Gordon has published in most of the major urban-planning, urban-transportation, and urban-economics journals. He has consulted for local, state, and federal agencies; the World Bank; the United Nations; and many private groups. Professor Gordon is coeditor of the journal Planning and Markets, an all-electronic refereed journal.
Alexander Tabarrok is Vice President and Research Director for The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, and he has taught at the University of Virginia and Ball State University. Dr. Tabarrok is also the editor of the Independent Institute book, Entrepreneurial Economics (Oxford University Press). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Law and Economics, Public Choice, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Review of Austrian Economics, Kyklos and many other journals. Dr. Tabarrok is the recipient of the Snavely Award, and he has been an Earhart Foundation Fellow and George A. and Frances Ball Foundation Fellow.
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