The Political Economy of Urban Reconstruction, Development, and Planning

Public economic planning is a pervasive part of the social space of political economy. In times of crisis, public officials in American government agencies at the local and national level increasingly use the vocabulary of economic planning. My PhD dissertation is a collection of papers representing a pointed critique of urban economic planning by public officials in times of crisis and prosperity. I explore John Stuart Mill’s argument in his Principles of political economy (1848) concerning the market mechanism (compared to rational central planning) through which economies experience remarkable recovery in the wake of devastation, "This perpetual consumption and reproduction of capital affords the explanation of what has so often excited wonder, the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation; the disappearance, in a short time, of all traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war" (Mill 1848, 74-75).

Find the article at the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.