Authoritarian and totalitarian is the alternative to the Classical Liberal model. And it always fails.

From The strongest case for urban density isn’t aesthetics, it’s math by Alan Cole.  He takes a regrettably totalitarian, authoritarian and deterministic view on an issue far more complex than is acknowledged.  

It's not just the math.  It's the whole system and in particular, it is the keeping of long term commitments, it is the respect for private property, it is the acknowledgement of complex interdependencies between multiple stakeholders with evolving interests, and finally, it is the acceptance that all stakeholders need to be involved whenever there is a changing of the long term rules.  

Instead, urban planners usually default to their own preferred (often ideological) goals and objectives, arrogate to themselves the power to decide, and willy-nilly ignore the implied inter-generational commitments over time.  Cole is not alone in this, it is a common Statist mindset and shows up among people who might not otherwise be statists.  

His opening is a bit of a red herring.  He creates a straw man which is easy to knock down. While the debate is frequently cast in terms of aesthetics, that is not the core issue.  The core issues are incentives, commitments, and goal determination.  

Conversation about land use and building in cities often turns to questions of aesthetics or personal preferences. You find impassioned advocates of various kinds of architecture or lifestyle.

Opponents of density insist on the merits of big yards, or claim that multifamily buildings are eyesores, or get into minutia about how certain types of buildings spur gentrification.

Some folks on the pro-density side are equally aesthetic-minded. They paint a picture of biking in dedicated lanes past cute row houses along narrow, lively streets filled with people and not cars.

My sympathies are with the pro-density side of this argument. But I see the aesthetics as beside the point. To me, it’s just math. The biggest virtues of denser cities flow from ironclad principles of geometry and arithmetic—along with some basic economic concepts.

It's not just the math and it's not just "ironclad principles of geometry and arithmetic".  The math is downstream from the goals and objectives.  If your goals and objectives are centrally determined and focus on centrally determined conditions (number of square feet of living space, amount of energy consumed, commuting times, water consumption, amount of individual and community productivity to be achieved, etc.) then the math follows.  

But that totalitarian central planning cannot exist in a free world.  Consent of the governed and equality before the law and property rights are all incompatible with such a model.  

Independently from the philosophical underpinnings is the reality that no central planning system has created a system of high satisfaction high productivity living environment; ever; anywhere.  Certainly not anywhere that lasts for more than a generation or so.

Cole walks through the mechanics of his one dimensional argument, focusing on prioritizing brevity of commute times, (with a preference for bicycling).  If, with a totalitarian mindset, you only value short commute times, then he is correct that the maths dictates high density.

But that is not the problem we are solving.

The problem we are solving is the reconciliation of multiple heterogenous and dynamic priorities which evolve over time and which encounter different constraints in different time periods.  Simply insisting that everyone should not care about aesthetics and that everyone should only be concerned about commute times is a simplistic non-answer to a complex problem.

First we have to acknowledge the other things which people value in their living conditions which likely include concerns about such factors as:

Safety

Security

Quality Education

Health 

 

Cost of Living  

 

Economic opportunities and growth

Political engagement and access

Environment (cleanliness and access)

Risk management

Commute times

Quality of life considerations (noise, litter, light pollution, fractious interactions, etc.) 

 

Aesthetics  

 

Clean and transparent government

Variety of experiences

Accessibility of experiences

 

Security of investment

Congestion

Respect for civil liberties and constitutional norms

There are many more particular values and objectives which might be acknowledged.  

But even with these, we have moved from a single variable totalitarian equation (how to minimize commute times) to a eighteen variable equation with different trade-offs between and among the variables based on the different priorities between and among residents.  And all these variables exist on a continuum.  

The first challenge is to 1) identify what are the valued outcomes among the residents, 2) what is the average ordinal ranking of those desired outcomes (e.g. do I value quality education higher or lower than, say, economic opportunities), and 3) what are the  acceptable trade-offs between these different variables (e.g. even though I might value education over economic opportunity, just how much opportunity am I willing to sacrifice to achieve how much improved education, i.e. the elasticities of demand?)

An eighteen variable equation with variant ordinal rankings and disparate demand elasticities in a dynamic, evolving and loosely coupled set of systems is not just "maths".  The glib dismissal of the complexity of the problem is what separates failed totalitarians from more successful incentive based systems which are self-correcting and adaptive (i.e. the Classical Liberal world order).  

And that is by no means the entire weakness of Coles' position.  He has also dismissed out of hand the reality that regulatory systems (such as zoning) represent an intergenerational and multi-interest contract.  In any sort of participatory democracy, there are ground rules applicable to everyone.  They obviously need to change over time as circumstances change.  But those ground rules represent something enduring.  They may change but they do not change frequently and they do not change without participation and without consideration.

Whatever the rules might be, they represent a framework within which people can make investment decisions that have lasting duration.  Decisions about what to build, where to build it, how to build it (durable or disposable), why to build it, etc.  The longer the duration of the rules, the more confident people can be in making long term investment decisions (whether home ownership or business investment).  When circumstances change requiring changes in the rules, people similarly need to be confident that they can be a part of the process around changing those rules so that their interests can be protected or at least considered.

Without acknowledging that the rules need to be stable, predictable, and accessible nor recognizing that stability of rules drives investment decisions, the totalitarian approach of "let the center decide and pack everyone in to achieve short commute times" is guaranteed to kill the goose which lays the golden egg.

Dismissing people's participation in rule setting, prioritizing single objectives over all others, ignoring the fact that settled rules are advantageous to economic development, denigrating people's protection of their investment and property decisions as NIMBYs are all critical failures in the authoritarian and totalitarian approach.  It is why it always fails.