Alexander Campbell Marshall is an American journalist who writes and speaks about urban planning, transportation, and political economy. Marshall has authored the books How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken,Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, and The Surprising Design of Market Economies. He is a former Senior Fellow of the Regional Plan Association and has contributed to publications concerned with urban design, municipal government, architecture, and related matters — including Metropolis and Governing.
From 1988 to 1997, Marshall worked as a staff writer and columnist for the Virginian-Pilot, where he came to focus on State and local politics and urban development. In 1998 and '99, Marshall wrote a bi-weekly opinion column as a correspondent for the Virginian-Pilot. Marshall left the paper in 1999 for a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He moved to New York City shortly thereafter, where he continued his freelance journalism.
Markets and Democracy
In his 2012 book The Surprising Design of Market Economies and related opinion pieces in The New York Times, Bloomberg View and other publications, Marshall asserts that government constructs markets in an economic sense. He says the "Free Market" is a false concept that impedes a more active discussion about what kind of markets government builds, which he says in a democracy should be part of regular public discussion. His book takes readers through the construction of property, corporations, patents and physical infrastructure, all of which Marshall views as the foundations for markets. The book and its ideas aroused opposition from those who view markets as existing outside government. On Sept 14, 2012, Nick Sorrentino, in his blog AgainstCronyCapitalism.org, described Marshall's ideas in a Bloomberg View essay the previous day as "nonsense." "Markets are as natural as a dawn in the desert," said Sorrentino. "And like all of these things they do not need government to exist." Marshall's ideas have received support from other quarters. Challenge Magazine, a journal edited by Jeffrey Madrick and whose editorial board includes Paul Krugman and Robert Solow, had an article by Marshall summarizing the book's ideas in its March/April 2014 issue.
In the 1990s, Marshall became involved in controversy over his criticism of New Urbanism, a school of suburban design he called a marketing scheme to repackage conventional suburban sprawl behind nostalgic imagery and aspirational sloganism. In a 1995 article in Metropolis Magazine, Marshall denounced New Urbanism as "a grand fraud". Marshall continued the theme in numerous articles, including an opinion column in the Washington Post in September of the same year, and in Marshall's first book, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken. Andrés Duany, the architect whose Duany Plater Zyberk & Company is among the leading promoters of New Urbanism, and some of whose projects had come under Marshall's strongest criticism, dismissed Marshall's criticisms in an interview for the Daily Princetonian, saying that Marshall, "... cannot stand the fact that we're working with the middle class. He wants us to spend all our time with the poor." New-Urbanism advocate James Howard Kunstler gave Marshall negative reviews of How Cities Work, in Metropolis Magazine. Kunstler wrote, He concluded Architectural Record called How Cities Work an "important new work," saying
Books
The Surprising Design of Market Economies,
Beneath The Metropolis: the Secret Lives of Cities,
