I think one of the biggest arguments in favor of a charter city like California Forever / East Solano ties back to your last post. It’s surprising how little variation and experimentation there is among municipal codes and institutions. Not sure how it came to be this way, but city staff and elected officials tend to have a very intense herd mentality, frequently stated as a desire to conform to how other cities do things, which is stronger than their desire to solve local problems.
Creating places that can just *try* different policies and demonstrate they are safe is a valuable public service.
I think there's probably a couple things contributing to what feels like the "institutional monoculture" I hear you describing.
On one level, Euclidean zoning took off because it was solving the same problem for the same (type) of person everywhere in the U.S.; namely, and I don't throw around this claim lightly, petty local elites looking to enforce class separation and by extension racial segregation.
Re: building codes...I'm less clear on why we all use basically vanilla IBC, but part of me feels like there's a very ST story about insurers requiring certain (legible to them) standards that defaulted to the IBC...but you'd probably know better.
If we're talking about the policy makers and bureaucrats...that's probably worthy of an entire dissertation (thinking someone from an anthropology dept), but...the most succinct thought I can provide here is just that we subsidized a specific political economy into being. Fast forward ~ a century and that's selected for specific institutional forms as well change averse political culture.
I think one of the biggest arguments in favor of a charter city like California Forever / East Solano ties back to your last post. It’s surprising how little variation and experimentation there is among municipal codes and institutions. Not sure how it came to be this way, but city staff and elected officials tend to have a very intense herd mentality, frequently stated as a desire to conform to how other cities do things, which is stronger than their desire to solve local problems.
Creating places that can just *try* different policies and demonstrate they are safe is a valuable public service.
I think there's probably a couple things contributing to what feels like the "institutional monoculture" I hear you describing.
On one level, Euclidean zoning took off because it was solving the same problem for the same (type) of person everywhere in the U.S.; namely, and I don't throw around this claim lightly, petty local elites looking to enforce class separation and by extension racial segregation.
Re: building codes...I'm less clear on why we all use basically vanilla IBC, but part of me feels like there's a very ST story about insurers requiring certain (legible to them) standards that defaulted to the IBC...but you'd probably know better.
If we're talking about the policy makers and bureaucrats...that's probably worthy of an entire dissertation (thinking someone from an anthropology dept), but...the most succinct thought I can provide here is just that we subsidized a specific political economy into being. Fast forward ~ a century and that's selected for specific institutional forms as well change averse political culture.