Title: Scaling Laws and the Fair-Use Proviso on Urban Territory
When
Abstract: Debates about land-use policy and neighborhood change must be informed by the right to territory. Plausibly, we have rights to occupy and control (to some extent) our local territory. One or both of these rights might justify local (i.e. municipal or neighborhood-based) control land-use policies. I’ll argue that this is the case only if such policies satisfy a fair-use proviso on appropriating territory. I defend a stringent interpretation of fair-use, and argue that certain empirical facts about the city mostly characterized as scaling laws (such as Zipf’s, Metcalfe’s, and Marshall’s laws) entail that local control policies violate a fair-use proviso on territory. These facts imply that many life plans are virtually unique to particular cities. Blocking access to them is plausibly unfair, and so unjustified.