JS: Right, and to also understand that if you're even planning residences and so on, first of all, that people have a history of taste. They have things that they like and you ought to respect that. Le Corbusier was fond of saying that cities and residences were machines for living. Well, the fact is that people don't look on them as machines. They have to be" they have to work to some extent of course, but they're also a kind of aesthetic environment that people care a lot about.
The fact is that we've designed a whole series of housing, suburban housing in particular, modeled on mother, father and two kids. You know, the kind of suburban, post Second World War rush to the suburbs. I think a lot of our urban planning ought to be very modest in terms of" it should be designed in terms of flexibility and plasticity because we actually don't know now that mother, father and two kids is a distinct minority of the way in which families are formed and live. We don't know what families are going to look like, what living arrangements are going to look like ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. So we should design housing that allows for a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of moving partitions so it can be shaped for the needs and desires and aesthetic tastes of people who are not yet even born.
Rob: Now you've described how the elites, the people who do these centralized, top down, idealized, simplified projects. They like miniaturization and they'll even create miniatures in the shape of pilot programs or theme parks and things like that. Can you talk a little about bit about that?
JS: Yeah, well I think we're all"one of the ways we deal with things that are out of our control is to deal with them in toy versions. You could say that a doll's house is a way of practicing. Right? Given traditional gender roles, young girls could play in a safe way at running a household, arranging a house and so on. The same is true, I think, historically for boys with tin soldiers and tanks and airplanes and so on. All of which escape our control and are dangerous and so we miniaturize them. In the same way, I think it's extremely common for dictators, not just dictators, to create little zones of perfect order as we call them model projects, model villages. The czars of Russia did this. So of course did Stalin. You could say in a sense the Tennessee Valley Authority in the depression under Roosevelt was an effort to do this as well. So in many cases it seems to me to be a mark of an elite that has thrown up its hands at creating a larger order. What it does as a substitute for this is to either create a model city, a kind of new city that is going to be representative of the new order that they want to create for the whole country, or they create model villages and model economic development zones that are" in which they can control all the variables because it's smaller and more contained. It's often not clear" this I would argue is often a substitute for, rather than an experiment of an order that could be imposed nationally, or on a broader scale.
Rob: Okay, so that makes sense. How does that jibe with E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful? This idea of miniaturization versus small is beautiful?
JS: It jibes very well with Schumacher. I actually try "and I should have probably given Schumacher more credit for that. I have a little thing about things that planners should keep in mind. One of them is, if possible, to do small steps and also favor reversibility. So if you" since we know almost always less about the world than we think we know about the world, if we make a huge intervention that is not reversible we're likely to ruin either the natural world or human lives or both of them. Think of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands projects in Siberia. Thousands of people were sent to Siberia to plant wheat and it failed because they didn't understand the environment. It would have been different if they sent, let's say, a tiny little colony to check it out for ten years and see what would grow and what wouldn't grow and so on.
The point is if you make small steps you can withdraw if it doesn't work out. You can adjust. You can change. If the steps you make are steps that you can reverse then you're unlikely to make large mistakes. So this is all about" and I think Schumacher was very much in that genre. It's all about a kind of modesty about our knowledge of how both the natural world works and our knowledge about what people like in terms of their kind of living arrangements. Schumacher" that's that small is beautiful which he experienced actually. I happened to be working, studying Burmese and going to Burma often and Schumacher developed this actually when he was in Burma as well.
Rob: Really? Did you get a chance to meet him?
JS: No, never met him.
Rob: So, in a number of your books you take on this top down, centralized planning. How do Libertarians respond?
JS: I'm sorry I missed the, I missed the last part.
Rob: This idea that we've been discussing where you take on and criticize this top down, centralized planning and design that oversimplifies. How do Libertarians respond to that?
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