Imagine a city that was self-creating
Scott Beyer of the Market Urbanism Report reviews Alain Bertaud's upcoming book, Order Without Design. The book brings economic logic and quantitative analysis to guide urban planning decision-making, colored by a hands-on, 55-year career as a global urban planner. Bertaud concludes that urban planning is oblivious to the economic effects of its decisions, and eventually creates unintended consequences to urban development.
While Jacobs was an observer of how cities work and a contributor to new concepts in urban economics, Bertaud goes a step further. His book brings economic logic and quantitative analysis to guide urban planning decision-making, colored by a hands-on, 55-year career as a global urban planner. His conclusion? The urban planning practice is oblivious to the economic effects of their decisions, and eventually creates unintended consequences to urban development.
In this book mainstream urban planning “buzzwords” such as Transit-Oriented Development, Inclusionary Zoning, Smart Growth and Urban Growth Boundaries are challenged with economic analysis, grounded on empirical observations on how cities work in real life, despite what planners aim to create.
Frequently mentioning the unavoidable effects of supply and demand, Bertaud reminds us that command economies such as the USSR or China have failed many years ago and embraced markets for the allocation of resources, but for some reason that has been ignored by the urban planning field. “Planning future land use while ignoring the predictable land value based on location makes no more sense than trying to ignore gravity when designing an airplane” is one of his many claims in this direction.
According to Bertaud, markets are efficient in the production and allocation of private buildings such as housing and commercial real estate. From regulating minimum building standards to “masterplans” for urban growth, the attempt to “design” a city is not only futile but also have the worst consequences for the poor. Scrap masterplans that are only revised every 10 years with old databases: urban planners should become city managers that track urban KPIs on a daily basis, such as prices and quantities of housing, population density and speed of different modes of transportation. The role of planners should then “be limited to fixing streets rights-of-way and designing transport systems that serve the shape and densities created by markets.”
Read the whole thing here.
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Photo by Jim Choate.