Alain Bertaud has worked in over forty cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without land markets — in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict the market’s ability to produce floor space — in Mumbai, in New York, and, indeed, in Australian cities.
In 2018, he synthesised sixty years of field work into a book: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, published by MIT Press. It became, quickly, one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing the most robust framework available for combining urban economics with urban planning.
In two hours of conversation, we cover the functioning of cities as labour markets, what communist cities taught him about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient — with specific numbers, rather than adjectives.
We also got, at the very end, an admission from Bertaud: that leaving the importance of urban design out of Order Without Design was a mistake, and Australia, of all places, is the one that convinced him this was so.
Listen via Substack, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Purchase a copy of Alain Bertaud’s Order Without Design.
Writing Prize open till June 30th
Thank you for the dozens of pitches we received thus far to our inaugural writing prize! Do not stress if you did not get a pitch in—we remain open to final essay submissions until midnight June 30th.
