Patrik Schumacher examines how cities develop when people have more freedom to build and organise themselves. These conversations connect architecture, land use and planning with the history of self-government, asking how the physical form of a place shapes its social and economic possibilities.
"Land use should not be prescribed by any planning regime. People come together into a city by seeking out very particular connections. And they have to find each other. There needs to be the degree of freedom to associate and self-organize what I call the co-location synergies."
"Bitcoin was built for chaos. Real estate was not."
"That's the biggest catch-22 of Free Cities. You're creating a refuge from the rules of a government, but ultimately, you're at the whim of the same government that has made the situation so bad in the first place."
"One day we will generate more revenue from the digital realm than from the physical world."
"Think about how depressing it would be to know everything we know about Fiat and not have Bitcoin. There are people who went through that. Bitcoin is the life raft they never had."
"It is sometimes hard to have a whole country reinvent itself. This process is too slow and too cumbersome with too much friction and no vested interest. We need more special economic zones and I think they play an enormous role in the whole progress of world civilization... exploring ways of doing business and way...
"If you have these ecologies of freedom, you can make amazing cities and that is one of the best things you can do. I think you'll be hard pressed to do it somewhere else these days. Even existing, amazing cities are being ruined by bad policy and not being allowed to mature or being allowed to mature enough.. There...
"We're not inventing anything here. These are all things that we walked around the world, here and there, and observed, and they are very doable, and they work in many places. We're just trying to reintroduce them in a packaged way to new places because that's very different from what the current norm is."
"Historical examples are very important because if you come up with a new idea that has never been tried and tested in what I call the market of living together, then there's a high probability that it will not work otherwise it would have already existed in some form or another. "
"It's inevitable that if you have a legislative body, then over time the number of laws will increase, the taxes will increase, indebtedness will increase and the number of people who are not productive will increase. That is in my view, absolutely inevitable. So you have to change the system... And I have made a p...
"I wrote an article trying to apply John Locke's principles of property to something like Mars. His basic principle is that if you mix your labour with a natural resource then you own the result. It's the same moral principle that Ayn Rand identified that you have a right to the product of your productive effort. S...
