Cities are an awkward research object for free-marketeers: externalities – positive and negative – are the stuff of cities, but they cannot be easily accommodated in the free-market paradigm. Indeed, by introducing externalities in the picture, the entire theoretical foundation of the free-market paradigm would breakdown.

The only way to cope with externalities associated with spatial development in democratic capitalism is constraining agents’ rights to transform the fabric of the city through formal rules and regulations. European city’s modern history does not leave any doubt about it. Indeed, spatial planning is about mitigating the social costs of urban transformations and fairly distributing social benefits. It is about generating a spatial order that reflects the values of the civitas. In the XIX century urban planning gained the status of a key sphere of public policy:  an indispensable tool to democratise capitalism.

It’s a long and fascinating story the way in which free-marketers have desperately attempted to prove that free-market negotiations deal in a socially efficient way with the creation and distribution of social costs and benefits of spatial development – and that urban planning is not only a waste of resources but rather an obstacle to the smooth working of free-market. Anyway, they seem to have succeeded. But not in proving their theory, which remains far-fetched at best, rather in hegemonizing the public discourse with a purely ideological interpretation of capitalism.

As I argued elsewhere – L’uso dell’economia. La Sinistra italiana e il capitalismo 1989-2022 –, in Italy most leftist intellectuals and politicians have performed a spectacular U-turn after 1989 and have embraced the free-market paradigm’s interpretation of capitalism. According to which land, labour and money are no exceptions, and their use in the economic process must be subdued to the discipline of free market.

In Milan practically the entire ruling class interprets the working of the economy through the lens of the free market paradigm. So, why should one be surprised – or even outraged – at the news that Milan lobbied for a national law that, by re-interpreting an already existing law, would lessen the administrative constraints on urban regeneration projects promoted by private entrepreneurs? For a national law that significantly weakens the role of urban planning? Milan’s current ruling class is proudly leftist and neoliberal, and makes no mystery about that.