Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities is Alain Bertaud's argument that urban planning would work far better if it drew on the tools of urban economics.
About This Book
Planners make fast decisions with lasting physical consequences—street widths, minimum lot sizes, building heights—yet tend to describe their goals in qualitative terms such as 'liveable' or 'resilient' that rarely connect to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, by contrast, is a quantitative discipline built on theory, models and evidence, but it has largely stayed in the academy. Bertaud sets out to bring the two together.
Drawing on five decades of work in some 40 cities, he treats markets as the essential mechanism of urban development, pointing to the waste produced where land and labour markets were suppressed, as in pre-reform China and Russia. He links a city's productivity to the size of its labour market, shows how infrastructure design and markets can reinforce each other, and examines how land prices and densities are distributed across a city. The book closes with a proposal for joint teams of planners and economists to manage cities better.
Key Features
- A practitioner's synthesis of urban planning and urban economics
- Evidence from five decades of work in around 40 cities worldwide
- Analysis of land prices, densities, mobility and affordability
- A critique of land-use regulations that try to redesign existing cities
What You'll Discover
- Why a city's labour market size is central to its productivity
- How infrastructure design and market forces can complement one another
- What happened in cities without land or labour markets
- How planners and economists could work together to manage cities
About the Author
Alain Bertaud is Senior Research Scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. He has worked as Principal Urban Planner for the World Bank and as an independent consultant and resident urban planner in cities from Bangkok to New York.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 432
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262550970
- Publisher: MIT Press
Perfect For: Urban planners, urban designers and policymakers, students of urban economics, and architects interested in the forces that actually shape cities.