Tuesday Links
By - Did David Hume learn about Buddhist philosophy while writing his Treatise on Human Nature? Maybe! While I’m not terribly interested in the midlife crisis stuff, the intellectual history detective-work is interesting, if inconclusive.
- Thanks to Jeremy W in comments, a partial answer to the question, which came up in comments recently, about the mix of housing types in a number of American cities. This is interesting for what it tells us, but also for what it doesn’t: despite a similar rate of single family homes, Dallas is less than half as dense as Seattle. (I’d be curious to see how this breaks down; that is, how much share of the blame would go to larger lot sizes in Dallas, denser apartment development in Seattle, percent of land devoted to not-housing greater in Dallas, or other factors I’m not presently identifying.)
- What percentage of land in Los Angeles is devoted to the automobile; in storage and movement? Lots of numbers get thrown around, but it’s surprisingly hard to pin down a source. The primary sources of the numbers in circulation seem to be Louis Mumford and Kirkpatrick Sale, neither of whom give any indication of how they arrived at the figure. We don’t actually know.
- I’d been meaning to put together some sort of review of Sonia Hurt’s marvelous Zoned in the USA; I’ll go the lazy route for now and link to this instead:
As Hirt points out, Americans appear to be unique in believing that there is something so special about single-family homes that they must be protected from all other kinds of buildings and uses—even other homes, if those homes happen to share a wall….Not only do other countries lack single-family zones, or at least use them much, much more rarely, but the separation of residential from other uses is much softer. Whereas placing a shop in the middle of a residential block would be counter to the very purpose of an American “residential” zone, it’s considered an essential part of neighborhood planning elsewhere.
In my experience many of the people quick to decry and lament America’s inferior approach to European countries on a range of issues, from health care to the strength of the social safety net, are often reflexive defenders of this American exceptionalism environmentally catastrophic leftover of mid-century social engineering efforts.
- I occasionally allude to my interest in Philip Pettit’s neorepublican approach to freedom in this space, which I believe I’ve promised some commenters a post about. Someday I’ll write that post, but not today. If you missed it the Spring, as I did, Danielle Allen’s column here does a nice job of deploying some of the central theoretical insights of Pettit’s thought in light of the killing of Freddie Gray and subsequent events in Baltimore, and is worth a read.
- That particular interest of mine is finally, after many long years, starting to produce some fruit in terms of publications. A short and still somewhat preliminary consideration of what how freedom as non-domination in the workplace might look like (in a society where jobs are still more or less mandatory for wide swaths of the population) has been published in an open access (hurray!) online journal. My somewhat lengthier examination of the limits of the role of the state in the pursuit of freedom as non-domination will be in the next issue of Polity; it’s online now but only accessible for those with institutional access. I’m happy to provide a PDF to any interested parties.
- Should non-citizen residents be allowed to vote in Seattle’s (and other cities) local elections? Nice to see this topic get some relatively friendly exposure at the Seattle times. There’s no constitutional barrier for cities who’d like their electorate to reflect their international, cosmopolitan character; recognizing that cities have a political identity beyond that of a mere sub-unit of the state or nation, and that people’s right to have a democratic say in their community shouldn’t be held hostage by byzantine, restrictive national citizenship policies makes good sense. It’s not some sort of new idea; before we became an anti-immigrant nation such policies were quite a bit more common, and it’s a fairly common practice is contemporary democratic societies. If there are good, non-xenophobic, substantive critiques of this expansion of the franchise, I haven’t seen them.