Liberty and democracy in the metropolis
Keywords: Political Science.

In 2018, 55% of the world's 7.5 billion people lived in cities. By 2050, The United Nations projects an urban population of 6.8 billion people, out of a total of 9.8 billion. These large agglomerations of people require systems of territoriality that determine which people have access to which areas and who is excluded, along with what people are permitted to do in the areas to which they do have access. However, territoriality is coercive. Private property law and public space regulations are legislated and enforced through the exercise of state authority. Trespassing on private property and violations of public space laws are punishable with fines and confinement. According to the liberal-democratic tradition, liberty is of the utmost importance and to respect freedom, coercion be justified to whoever is coerced. Thus, the central question of my dissertation is: What conditions must a territorial system meet in order to be justifiable to those who are subject to that system? A liberal-democratic state purports to justify coercive authority two ways: First, decisions are made democratically, by the people. The free and equal participation of all citizens in collective decision-making helps justify the results of those decisions to those who are bound by them. Second, lawmaking is constrained by the liberty of the individual. Coercive laws that are important for ensuring the liberty of citizens are justifiable because the ideal of liberty creates the necessity of justification in the first place. Corresponding to the division between collective self-determination and respect for the freedom of the individual, this dissertation is divided into two parts. Part one develops a spatial theory of freedom—to understand how territorial systems help secure human freedom and to understand when the limits that territorial systems place on human movement and activity are compatible with freedom. Part two investigates how local and metropolitan governments can facilitate free and equal citizen participation in the government of the territorial systems to which citizens are subject. Chapter One develops the principle of sufficient spatial discretion, which sets a minimum threshold for how people ought to be able to use space. I assume that people have a variety of goals or purposes, and that people are frequently in the position of not having quite everything they need to fulfill them, in the way of space, materials, and relationships. To be free, people must realistically be able to alter and enlarge their means, in order to pursue their purposes. Sufficient spatial discretion requires that people can use areas in their spatial network—which includes all the areas to which a person has easy access on a day-to-day basis—to develop social relations according to prevailing social norms, work in ways compatible with their aptitudes and market realities, learn and practice skills related to their purposes, safely store materials acquired through work and exchange, and care for their bodily needs and hygiene. Additionally, sufficient spatial discretion requires that people be able to alter their spatial network either by relocating to a spatial network more suitable to their purposes or by purchasing property that can then be modified to suit their purposes. Sufficient spatial discretion does not guarantee that anyone will succeed at any particular purpose, but instead requires that people be able to try without being blocked by territoriality from enlarging their means or altering their spatial network. Although sufficient spatial discretion helps to justify rights of private property, sufficient spatial discretion also justifies a variety of qualifications to property rights. However, some views of private property in the liberal tradition are resistant to qualifications of property rights, such as historical entitlement theory. If historical entitlement theory is the correct view of property, then any qualifications to property rights used to ensure sufficient spatial discretion, such as zoning, tenancy, and anti-discrimination laws, or eminent domain to provide new public spaces, may be blocked by property rights claims. My argument in Chapter Two thus proceeds by examining whether the main objection to historical entitlement theory, called the unilateral duty-creation objection, is successful. According to the objection, when someone appropriates unowned land, that person impermissibly imposes duties on other people to respect the new property claim. I find that unilateral duty-creation objection is not successful because original appropriation is grounded in a natural right to use the materials of the earth to begin endeavors and maintain those endeavors against interference. Original appropriation does not create new duties, but simply applies a corollary duty we all share to respect the endeavors of other people. However, in the context of densely settled, sprawling agglomerations of people in which all the land is already accounted for by public and private ownership, rights of property alone are inadequate for protecting the capacity of individuals to embark upon endeavors. The principle of sufficient spatial discretion ensures that residents of the city can embark on endeavors, even if they begin with no wealth or property of their own. Rather than challenging the principle of sufficient spatial discretion, the historical entitlement theory of property supports sufficient spatial discretion and justifies qualified property rights as part of a system of territoriality that facilitates sufficient spatial discretion. Chapter Three turns to the relationship between territoriality and democracy. After reviewing mainstream democratic theories, the chapter develops four arguments for local government. First, local governments are the most capable of intelligibly aggregating citizen preferences and judgements about territorial issues, and of producing public justifications for territorial policy. Second, citizens can most effectively participate in democratic self-governance when governments are local. Third, local government enables different municipalities to have different legal and territorial systems, which in turn allows citizens to choose the set of laws by which they will be governed. That choice helps manufacture consent and, fourth, respects autonomy and equality, by making it more likely that each people can find spatial networks compatible with their conceptions of the good. The argument for local government, however, only goes so far. Chapter Four demonstrates that in policy areas with strong regional dynamics, especially housing and transportation, commitment problems and coordination problems among municipalities make it difficult for municipalities to respond effectively to citizen preferences, enact policies supported by public reasons, or ensure resident mobility by making housing widely available or building efficient transit networks. Metropolitan governments can overcome collective action problems by internalizing all the strategic actors into one legislative body. In these cases, a metropolitan government would enhance democratic legitimacy by enabling more responsive government. Likewise, metropolitan governments can better ensure resident mobility between municipalities, which in turn is important for discerning consent and providing sufficient spatial discretion. Chapters Three and Four support a democratic principle of subsidiarity. According to this principle, political authority should by presumption be located with local governments. This presumption is to be set aside when larger units of government are required for solving collective action problems among local governments. Additionally, superior levels of government manage the system of local government, administer unincorporated land, and ensure citizen mobility throughout the state. Building on the previous chapters, the fifth and final chapter illustrates that, together, the principle of subsidiarity and the principle of sufficient spatial discretion are general principles for a liberal-democratic system of territoriality. After showing how these principles incorporate the liberal-democratic values of liberty, equality, and democracy, I examine their relationship to private property, spatial inequality in cities, education, and individual political activity. Subsequently, I consider whether, and how, my view can accommodate the special territorial claims of illiberal, nomadic, and indigenous groups. I conclude the dissertation with examples of how a few different cities have facilitated the spatial discretion of their citizens.