This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 7, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole believes that individuals should design

their existence rather than leave the task to urban planners.

At Cato University last week, O'Toole gave attendees a sample of his extensive knowledge of urban planning as a field, a mindset, and a nuisance.

This is a portion of his speech.

Most urban planners went to school

at an urban planning school that is associated with an architecture department.

Now architects tend to have big egos.

And those big egos lead them to believe that by shaping people's buildings they shape people's

lives. They love to quote Winston Churchill who said we shape our buildings

and then our buildings shape us.

Well urban planners go to the next step.

They say, we shape our cities and then our cities shape us.

But the we and the us are different. We the urban planners shape our cities and then our cities shape you everybody else.

Is what they really mean.

So philosophy is physical determinism.

If we can design the city a certain way, people will stop driving, they'll start walking,

they'll start bicycling and riding transit, they'll use less energy, they'll emit

less greenhouse gas emissions.

As Washington Post writer Joel Garow wrote, planners seem to think that human behavior is malleable and nobody is better equipped

by dint of intelligence and education than the planners to do the malleting.

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