LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP
presents
Professor Robert Ellickson
Yale Law School
The Law and Economics of Street Layouts:
Why Most Downtowns are Rectangular Grids
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
4:10 – 6:00
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
People congregate in cities to improve their prospects for social and economic interactions. As Jane Jacobs recognized, the layout of streets in a city’s central business district can significantly affect individuals’ ability to obtain the agglomeration benefits that they seek. The costs and benefits of alternative street designs are capitalized into the value of abutting lots. A planner of a street layout, as a rule of thumb, should seek to maximize the market value of the private lots within the layout. By this criterion, the street grid characteristic of the downtowns of most U.S. cities is largely successful. Although a grid layout has aesthetic shortcomings, it helps those who frequent a downtown to orient themselves and move about. A grid also is conducive to the creation of rectangular lots, which are ideal for siting structures and minimizing disputes between abutting landowners. Major changes in street layouts, such as those accomplished by Baron Haussmann in Paris and Robert Moses in New York City, are unusual and typically occur in bursts. Surprisingly, the aftermath of a disaster that has destroyed much of a city is not a propitious occasion for the revamping of street locations.
Robert C. Ellickson has been Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at Yale Law School since 1988. He formerly was a member of the law faculties at Stanford and USC. Professor Ellickson’s books include The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (2008), Order Without Law (1991) (awarded the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1996), Land Use Controls: Cases and Materials (3rd ed. 2005, with Vicki L. Been), and Perspectives on Property Law (3rd ed. 2002, with Carol M. Rose and Bruce A. Ackerman). He has published numerous articles in legal and public policy journals on topics such as land use and housing policy, land tenure systems, homelessness, and the organization of cities, households, and community associations. In 2000–01, he served as President of the American Law and Economics Association.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
