In today's Sunday Wichita Eagle I read the headline, "Plaza falls short," with the subtext, "Old Town tax district misses goals."
It goes on: "A special tax district set up to pay for millions of dollars of public spending in the Old Town Cinema Plaza is generating less than half the revenue it's supposed to -- and taxpayers citywide will have to pick up the tab."
It is ironic that Wichita happens to be hometown of Economics Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith. I recently read his paper in the American Economic Review ("Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics") which is the revised version of his lecture delivered in Stockholm at the end of 2002.
Not many towns can boast a Nobel Laureate. In the area of city planning, we could learn a lot from him. I certainly can't speak for Dr. Smith -- and I don't claim to understand his paper entirely... but I think I get the gist of at least some of it: when it comes to designing social solutions, have a little humility or eat a lot of crow.
It is important to have smart people using their minds and purposeful reasoning to think up creative innovations and solutions for increasing the wealth of a community. But these are usually imperfect solutions at best -- and harmfully disastrous at worst. Good social solutions EVOLVE over time. Evolution requires two parts: variety and selection.
The use of reason to construct solutions turns out to be a great way to generate lots of variety. That's where the smart people come in. Unfortunately, it stinks at coming up with a good selection process to determine which particular solutions will be successful -- and that is where ecological processes (like markets) shine.
City planning of the kind that produces cinema plazas and downtown arenas often fails miserably for two reasons: first, it applies the rules of the "personal" world to the impersonal; second because it attempts to bypass a necessary evolutionary process -- having the hubris to believe that it can predict the future, that it has perfect knowledge of future conditions and alternatives.
There's a lot packed into that last paragraph -- but I am out of time. After pondering Dr. Smith’s ideas a little longer I may write more… in the meantime, consider this parting quote from the same Wichita Eagle article:
"The cinema plaza is the latest in a series of public and public-private projects that have underperformed compared with projections. Others include the Hyatt Regency Wichita, Ice Sports Wichita and Auburn Hills Golf Course [...] [Mayor] Mayans said he's getting tired of such surprises [...]"
The arrogance of planners never ceases to amaze me. Get more sleep, Carlos - because I suspect that you'll eventually add the downtown arena, the waterwalk and the other projects to that list.
