Alain Bertaud (previously) is an urban planner who never met an urban economist until almost a decade after graduating from planning school. The economist opened his eyes: not only did urban economics often teach exactly the opposite of what planning schools taught, the economists based their conclusions on data, models, and real world experience, while the planners based their ideas on intuition and the general beliefs of previous generations of planners.
Bertaud’s new book, Order without Design, reflects a lifetime of growing skepticism about urban planning dogma. Planners, says Bertaud, based their ideas on rules of thumb that were developed by people who often know nothing about the people they are regulating or planning for.
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Urban planners who try to slow down commute speeds — either by getting people out of their cars and onto transit or by deliberately allowing congestion to grow to reducing driving — end up fracturing major urban areas into multiple smaller labor markets. Planners seek to turn urban areas into “urban villages” in which people both live and work, but such villages, says Bertaud, don’t exist: even though many suburbs have a jobs-housing balance, most people don’t work in the suburbs in which they live. All of these things reduce urban productivity.
While there are no cities without planners, Bertaud points out that the world-wide range of cities goes from Houston, where there is almost no government intrusion into land markets, to some capital cities such as Brasilia, which were almost completely centrally planned. The comparative experiences within this range has persuaded Bertaud that cities that rely more on markets and less on planning to determine land uses are more affordable, more mobile, and more productive. This is an essential book in the Antiplanner’s library.
Cities are the way they are due to the evolutionary circumstances that made them. Geography.
New York is an Island near water, Baltimore has a harbor, some cities exist in valleys where they were well protected from invaders, blah blah blah. Economics didn’t matter until they 20th century. By then, the economies of scale already had a workforce, technologies, infrastructure put into place. But even now cities are losing populations to superior offers.
China is the embodiment of mass urbanization, done on purpose but it’s skyscraper boom and massive over building are the epitome of inevitable poor economic indicator. Nevermind the fact they don’t know how to handle the infrastructure overload and how they’re going to afford it.
Bertaud is a fascinating writer and researcher. One of his most interesting papers to date was one he wrote in the mid-1990s examining nascent trends in land markets in former Soviet cities (see here). I’m sure he covered this in his book. Similar results have been documented in places like Poland. It is amazing how quickly new urban forms can emerge when the shackles of central planning are removed.
I’m sure the book is interesting and has some insights. However, Bertaud’s credibility is suspect since he did attend the “American Dream” (sic) conference and has worked with that charlatan now in his dotage, Wendell Cox.
http://www.planetizen.com/blogs/103583-order-without-design-pro-housing-pro-infrastructure convinces me to buy Bertaud’s book, not Randal’s post.
Houston is not a city it’s a nightmare, mostly a place where people drive to skyscrapers.
So abysmal, they used it as the actual backdrop for the movie Robocop………..
Have you been to Houston? It’s really not much different from any other major metro area. In many ways, I found it better.
As for msetty, well, I suppose his opinions are suspect because he does goats on his sister’s ranch, where he lives.
Anybody in a city with diagonal streets curses the planner who thought diagonal streets were somehow more efficient or made the maps look cool.