Whether intended or not, Kotkin points out that encouraging people to live in crowded cities not only stifles the ownership of private property that’s been a mark of increasing mass material prosperity for two centuries, but it re-creates a renting class at the mercy of moneyed landowners that he describes as a “new feudalism.”
On the surface this might resemble the predatory relationship between employers and workers that Marx agitated against, but among the many things that have changed is that the people often agitating for a new urbanism wouldn’t consider themselves philosophically opposed to Marx and his legacy – probably because this brave new world never seems to put them in a rented tenement.
