Podcasts about alain bertaud

Send us a textRyan Streeter is the executive director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, he tells us about his time in the intersection of think tanks, government, and academic communities. We talk about cities, the importance of mobility and growth, how to foster those characteristics, skepticism of government, and living in and creating a community that fosters social cohesion and critical thinking. Want to explore more?Alain Bertaud on Urban Planning and Cities, a Great Antidote podcast.Raj Chetty on Economic Mobility, an EconTalk podcast.Scott Winship on Poverty and Welfare, a Great Antidote podcast.Charles Murray on Dignity and the American Dream, a Future of Liberty podcast.Jeremy Horpedahl, Americans are Still Thriving, at Econlib.Support the showNever miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Why are European cities charming and American cities often so charmless? Simple, says urbanist Alain Bertaud: most American cities are zoned for single-family housing. The result is not enough customers within walking distance of a business, and not enough parking for the customers who drive. Why American cities are zoned that way is related to culture and history. Hear Bertaud and EconTalk's Russ Roberts talk about urban problems and how to solve them--not through urban design or planning, but by respecting what makes each place unique.

Alain Bertaud, urban planning expert, says urban planners aren't doing the job they're supposed to do. He explains how and why they're trying to tell people were to live or enforce a way of life, like we're seeing in some cities across Canada. Bertaud says while urban planners are touting 15-minute cities, the idea is impossible and doesn't make a city work.   

Alain Bertaud, urban planning expert, says urban planners aren't doing the job they're supposed to do. He explains how and why they're trying to tell people were to live or enforce a way of life, like we're seeing in some cities across Canada. Bertaud says while urban planners are touting 15-minute cities, the idea is impossible and doesn't make a city work.   

The Gang discuss various topics including dick energy, communal dancing, RFK Jr.'s potential partnership with the Libertarian Party, and the last monocultural moment in our lifetime. They also analyze the record-breaking viewership of the Super Bowl and its significance in today's fragmented media landscape. The conversation covers topics such as the Taylor Swift effect on the Super Bowl, the impact of Super Bowl commercials, Biden's absence from the Super Bowl interview, the distraction caused by the Super Bowl, Jon Stewart's return to television, Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin, the examination of Mein Kampf and minstrel shows, the Russian perspective on NATO, Ukrainian agency, surprising election outcomes, and an interview with urbanist Alain Bertaud. In this episode, the host shares a personal story of quitting drinking and the impact it had on her life. She explains why she decided to record an episode about it and make it available for free on Patreon. The host also discusses the feasibility of betting on US elections and the limitations faced by American citizens. She shares an anecdote about providing an insider tip on an election outcome and the ability to buy and sell shares in political predictions. The conversation concludes with a discussion on congressional stock picks and the potential for investing in microchips.Chapters00:00Introduction and Dick Energy03:16Communal Dancing09:03RFK Jr. and the Libertarian Party17:43The Last Monocultural Moment38:11Super Bowl Viewership44:58The Taylor Swift Effect48:00Super Bowl Commercials51:10Biden's Super Bowl Interview54:17Super Bowl Distraction57:51U.S. Senate Vote during Super Bowl58:16Biden's Health and Media Perception59:42Jon Stewart's Return01:02:29Tucker Carlson's Interview with Putin01:08:14Examining Mein Kampf and Minstrel Shows01:12:24Russian Perspective on NATO01:19:07Ukrainian Agency01:24:32Surprising Election Outcomes01:26:24Cities: Skylines and Urban Planning01:28:47Interview with Alain Bertaud01:29:44Personal Journey of Quitting Drinking01:31:42Betting on Elections01:33:34Insider Tips on Election Outcomes01:34:31Congressional Stock Picks01:35:28Investing in Microchips Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alain Bertaud is a feted urbanist, who before becoming a professor at NYU, worked in city planning in communist China, as well as on projects in Algeria, Cuba, and his native France. He joins to discuss what work and results look like in top-down command economies.   Alan Bertaud from City Week: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sim-city-was-79663680?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link  

Alain Bertaud is an urbanist and a senior research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He is the author of a book about urban planning that is titled Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. He has worked as an urban planner in a multitude of cities around the world. Today, we talk about his view of a city and what he's observed as an urban planner. He gives us examples and draws connections between how culture and regulation shape cities --- he means literally; cities shaped by regulation are shaped like donuts. We discuss the problems with central planning from old Soviet cities to today's urban sprawl caused by zoning regulation. He explains how being a "free market urban planner" is not a contradiction and shares personal stories about how he came to this career.Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Alain Bertaud is an urbanist and a senior research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He is the author of a book about urban planning that is titled Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. He has worked as an urban planner in a multitude of cities around the world. Today, we talk about his view of a city and what he's observed as an urban planner. He gives us examples and draws connections between how culture and regulation shape cities --- he means literally; cities shaped by regulation are shaped like donuts. We discuss the problems with central planning from old Soviet cities to today's urban sprawl caused by zoning regulation. He explains how being a "free market urban planner" is not a contradiction and shares personal stories about how he came to this career.Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Alain Bertaud is an urbanist and a senior research scholar at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. He is the author of a book about urban planning that is titled Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. He has worked as an urban planner in a multitude of cities around the world. Today, we talk about his view of a city and what he's observed as an urban planner. He gives us examples and draws connections between how culture and regulation shape cities --- he means literally; cities shaped by regulation are shaped like donuts. We discuss the problems with central planning from old Soviet cities to today's urban sprawl caused by zoning regulation. He explains how being a "free market urban planner" is not a contradiction and shares personal stories about how he came to this career.Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Ep 474 -  How Markets Shape Cities Guest: Alain Bertaud By Stuart McNish   What is a city and why does it exist? That may seem like a simple question but according to Alain Bertaud, the author of “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities,” the answer is “not merely to house people but rather accommodate labour markets.” He goes on to acknowledge, “People are the most important part. They are the main attraction.”   The challenge for city planners, argues Bertaud, is that “they run into the interdependence between state and markets and the tension that results when allocating resources.” When facilitating the needs of markets, Bertaud contends that “planners are focused on building codes and architecture and not the needs of markets.” He says that planners need to work with urban economists.   We invited Alain Bertaud, the author of “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities,” to join us for a Conversation That Matters about how markets shape our cities.    Learn More about our guests career at careersthatmatter.ca

In this podcast, we dive into the shift towards a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci, an architect, planner, and urban enthusiast. We discuss how the modernist paradigm of deconstructing everything into individual parts and putting them back together linearly is becoming less relevant. Instead, we see a shift towards a more organic, bottom-up approach that looks at the city as a complex and multi-layered system. Joni Baboci is the founder of Layer, a spatial orchestration platform that empowers teams to govern through tactics and patterns while leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has previously served as the General Director of Planning and Urban Development for the City of Tirana and the director of Atelier Albania, a structure of the Albanian government dealing with national and regional strategic planning. Joni has executed planning, design & development projects at different scales at the national, regional and local levels. Joni shares his insights on how technological advancements such as AI and blockchain are enabling bottom-up processes in planning and thinking about cities. We also delve into the challenges of making these ideas practical and building a process of making them a reality. Joni highlights the importance of reinventing physical production through local value loops, and incentivizing the interconnection between urban and rural scapes. We also discuss how DAOs and blockchain technology can improve local governance and participation, and how cities can invest in citizen-based entrepreneurship that let them decide how to perform a job or access a service rather than relying on a top-down approach. Join us as we explore the potential of a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci. Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/joni-baboci Key highlights 

Technology is forcing our cities to evolve. It is redefining the meaning of location and accessibility, it changes the way we work and move around, and it forces us to reconsider many of our basic assumptions. How should cities respond? What can be done to increase opportunity and tackle inequality? What is the connection between commuting, remote work, and overall prosperity? What should we make of all the trendy ideas that are currently being proposed? And what's so good about cities anyway? This is a recording of a conversation between Dror Poleg and Alain Bertaud. Alain Bertaud is one of the most influential voices on the topic of cities, urban labor markets, and urban transportation networks. He is the author of Order Without Design, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Senior Fellow at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management. Previously, Bertaud served as the principal urban planner at the World Bank as a resident urban planner across the globe — from Bangkok and Sana'a to Paris and New York. He even worked as a draftsman for Le Corbusier in India.

Of the world's 100 largest cities, more than a quarter are in China. In 1980, about 20% of the population lived in a city, by 2020 that had risen to more than 60%. Rapid urbanization has seen improved transport links and housing giving millions of people access to better healthcare, education and jobs. Poverty rates have fallen sharply, while at the same time the economy has boomed. So, what lessons can be learned from that? And how can the benefits of urbanization be balanced with inevitable environmental consequences?In this episode, Juliet Mann speaks to Chris Hamnett, Professor of Geography at Kings College London, Dr Yan Song, the Director of North Carolina University's Program on Chinese Cities and world-renowned urbanization expert, Alain Bertaud. 

What should urban planners design, and what should they leave to citizens and markets? To answer that question we summon none other than Alain Bertaud, an urban planner who has worked in major cities across multiple continents. He is a senior fellow at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Design, and was the principle urban planner for the World Bank. He's the author of "Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities."  SUPPORT THE SHOW! www.patreon.com/andrewheaton 

Technology creates more work. More work creates technology. But the way it does so is increasingly unclear. Originally published on March 3, 2023 here. A few housekeeping notes:

In this episode, Shruti speaks with Alain Bertaud about how Indian cities have evolved, utilities pricing, land use restrictions such as floor area ratio and floor space index, slums, charter cities, urbanization in Africa and much more. Bertaud is an urbanist, distinguished visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and senior research scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. From 1980 to 1999, he was the principal urban planner at the World Bank. His book about urban planning is titled “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.” Recorded February 7th, 2023 Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Follow us on Twitter Follow Shruti on Twitter Follow Alain on Twitter Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox.

I was thrilled to get a chance to talk about cities with Alain Bertaud - he has been one of the most important thinkers in urban planning for the past fifty years. His book Order Without Design is a must-read and an excellent summary of his research (conducted in collaboration with his wife Marie-Agnes, an urban planning scholar in her own right) project with aim of bridging the gap between urban planning and urban economics. Alain is a brilliant and generous teacher who has greatly influenced me - I hope my questions have done their bit to honour him.TranscriptTobi; Welcome to Ideas Untrapped podcast and my guest today is legendary urban planner, Alain Bertaud, welcome to the show, sir, it's an honour to speak to you.Alain; Thank you very much for inviting me, I'm quite honoured.Tobi; You are aware that some of the biggest cities into the future are going to be in the so-called low-income countries, because urbanization is exploding in cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and these cities are a bit different from some of the cities in other places around the world, especially in the West, you know, in that they are lower-income, they are a bit congested, they don't have much density, and, it's a challenge for such cities having to host that many people. Now, if I may ask you, what would you say the problem has been in making some of these cities work? Are we seeing a failure of markets or planning or a bit of both? Alain; I think that there are sometimes market failures. But I think that there has been a neglect of infrastructure. For me, a city, and that's something common to all the cities of the world, whether they are, you know, in Europe, in America, in Africa, or Asia, the main things for cities are labour markets, that's why people go to cities to find a job. And that is why a big firm will go to Lagos. They will go to Lagos, rather than a small town somewhere. They will go to Lagos because they will find in Lagos people who are competent in whatever they want to do. They will find a large labour force, you will have a lot of choices. And so if I am a migrant living in a small village somewhere in Africa, and not necessarily Nigeria, I may want to go to Lagos because I know there are a lot of jobs there. So if we accept that a city is a labour market, the most important things are two things. First is transport. You should be able to move in this large city. Within an hour, you should be able, ideally, to go from one side to another side, in order to find the job you want and change jobs. You know, changing job also is very important. That's why company town, you know… sometimes you have a mining town or a town developed around a steel mill or something, and then everybody there is working for one employer - the mine or the steel mill, this is not very good, because you have no chance of changing jobs. I think the advantage of very large cities like Lagos or Abidjan or Dakar, is that there are so many employers that you can fill your way, you know, you can change jobs and learn things from other people, that's what's a city. Now, what should the planning be? Planning should be transport, you know, there should be a system of transport. And when I say transport, I don't mean necessarily a subway, I mean, subway sometimes is necessary, but not always. It could be informal transport, you know, the different minibuses, for instance, so things like that which are private. But the planners often consider them as a nuisance, you know, that they are a little messy, they stop everywhere. Sometimes they don't follow the rules very much. But if they are there, it's because there are people who prefer to take this informal thing rather than a regular bus. So we have to take them into account. And we have to make them more efficient, you know, by having specific stops where they can stop which is wide enough and things like that rather than eliminating them. So the first thing is transport. The goal is to allow people to move from one part of the city to another in less than one hour. Now, in a very large city like Lagos, I suppose it's a bit like Mexico City, you will find that this is impossible right now [to move] from one side of the city to [the other], you know, let's say you go from north to south, it may take you three hours to go there. The goal is to decrease this time, you know, [and] how do you decrease this time so that you can have access? Any individual should have access to the maximum number of jobs. And it's the same for the employer. You know, the employer, when they look for employees, if they move to Lagos, suddenly they need somebody with specialized, I don't know, a welder, for instance, somebody who is very specialized in something. They want to have a choice between competent people. If the transport system works well, they will have a choice between 100 welders and they will select what is best for their company. So transport is the most important thing and you have to take into account informal transport, you know, this is very important. You cannot just say the best will be to have a subway or... you know, it's possible that the subways might be necessary but it's only one part of the transport system. You cannot pretend that one day everybody will move by subway, or municipal buses, or even ferries or things like that.All these modes of transport have to be combined and thought together, including cars, by the way. Many of my colleagues now are dreaming of cities without cars, I don't think it can work because first you have freight, and you have certain jobs which cannot be done without a car, you know, if you are a plumber, or if you are an electrician, you have to move around with your material, you cannot take a subway… if you are a plumber, you know, with your bathtub or something like that. So a large city has acquired a lot of freight, you know, you have restaurants, you have bars, you need to bring food to those restaurants, to [bring] bottles of beers, something like that. So you need a transport system which accommodates all modes of transport. Some of my colleagues have a preferred means of transport that they love, you know, say light train, tramway, or bicycle, or scooters, or whatever, or subway, or monorail. And I think that it's possible that a monorail is a good thing, but it will be only a small component, you know. So the job of the planner is to accommodate all these different modes of transport. And if people prefer to take even a taxi motorcycle for instance, which I think in many countries of Africa, I'm sure in Lagos it exists too, you have to accept that this is the best way for some people, not everybody, but for some people. So you have to also accommodate that and say, Well, what do we do for them to reduce, for instance, reduce the pollution they cause but also reduce accident, make them more convenient, because those means of transport are serving certain groups of people who have no choice, who cannot afford it, or who live in a part of the city which is not served by the normal transport. So transport is very important and transport has to be multimodal, and you have to look at it. The other thing which is very important in every city is housing. People move to the city from the countryside or from another city, and they look for a job, but they have to find housing. And very often, I think [for] many of the cities in Africa, but also in Asia, or even in Europe, they didn't welcome the migrants, they considered that the migrants are a nuisance, you know, because usually, they are relatively poor. Some of them are coming from the countryside, so they do not have the skills. You know, they have skills, but they are raw skills, which are not necessarily very useful in the city. So they have to learn skills. The city has to welcome those people because they are the labour force of the future. They are the ones who are going to pay taxes in the future. You cannot import only people who have PhDs or things like that, I mean, those are very useful, too. But we have seen that during the pandemic. During the pandemic suddenly I remember in New York, but everywhere else, people were saying indispensable people, who are the indispensable people? And we found that the indispensable people were not professors like me, they were people who were delivering food in grocery stores, they were indispensable. They are indispensable for the life of the city. So that's why they have to be welcome too, you know, and for that they need housing. So they need housing, they need land. I think that the big mistake that many cities have done, again, everywhere in Europe, as well as in Asia, or in South Africa, by the way, is to concentrate too much on housing, and not enough on infrastructure. I think what planners need to do is to let people build whatever they want even if it's a shack, but provide clean water supply, provide sewers, and some services like health [centres] and schools, and let people build whatever they want on the lot, even on the very small lot. In my book, I have an example in Indonesia what they call the Kampung development which were villages which were absorbed by the city, and you know, if they were very poor, they will have a lot which is only 15 square meters, and they will build a house of 10 square meters with corrugated iron and bamboo and then that's it. This is okay, providing they have clean water supply and that the dirty water is evacuated. What is terrible is to live in an area where the garbage accumulates, children play in dirty water and there are no health facilities at all or schools. So, to me, the criterion of a successful city is how long do they take to absorb a migrant, a migrant who is coming from the rural area, who has no skills, he has only his arms or her arms. And how long does it take to absorb them so that they can get an urban job where they are very productive for the city and then contribute to the welfare of the city. So some cities have tried to measure it a bit informally and some cities take one or two generations. You have one or two generations of migrants living in extreme poverty, very often being sick because they live in very unhealthy neighbourhoods, and it takes two generations to be absorbed. In other cities, in some cities of Asia that I know, in half a generation, those people are absorbed. So for me, how quickly you can absorb these people in the city life is a sign of success that you can measure. Now, the attitude very often of the housing board or people in government involved in housing, is to say, well, these are poor people, let us be nice to them and build really nice houses for them. So they build kind of a walk-up apartment, or five, six-storey or something like that. And the problem with that is sometimes they are well designed, most of the time badly designed. But when they are well designed, they are too expensive. So the government, instead of delivering one million lot a year to absorb those migrants, they deliver 500 houses. So the houses are nice, you know, they have electricity, they have plumbing, but 500 houses do not solve any problem at all for all the others. So I think that you have to give up the idea of building houses. And this is not very popular, by the way. Politicians like to say, we are going to have one... usually, they say 1 million houses, and then they end up building on the 5000. And they call the press, they build a simple building and they say, you see everybody in the city now is going to be entitled to a house like that, and then never get built. And then we are back to square one. So I think we have to be very realistic, we have to accept poverty, we have to accept that there is a lot of difference in income in a city and we have to concentrate the resources of the government on the few things which are important, like water supply, sewer and things like that. Not, you know, not having an ideal city. And poverty is something which is temporary. For instance, I used to work in Korea, a long time ago, you know, Korea, in 1968-70 I think had about the GDP of Mali, you know, it has about the same and then what happened? And suddenly now it's an industrialized country. They absorbed migrants very intelligently, I think the absorbed migrants and the area which were slums are well developed, you know, you still have neighbourhoods which were former slums which have been developed. So you see, poverty is a temporary phenomenon. It's not a permanent one. And you have to accept it when it happens. But then slowly make the people employed, so slowly, they will emerge from poverty. You don't address the problem of poverty by giving say somebody who has an income of, let's say, $300 a year to give this person a house, which costs you know, $50,000 is not going to solve poverty because you will not give very many houses like that to them. And probably those houses are going to go to people of much higher income very soon. So you see where infrastructure is always useful for everybody. So that's my attitude, those two things. First, the people who live in the city are the ones who are going to make this city so the infrastructure has to serve this. And the infrastructure, in particular the roads, has to give access to a lot of land even if the cities sprawl, so that everybody has access to a piece of land where they can build something. If originally they build a shack which is not very nice,[it] doesn't matter providing they have an infrastructure which allows them to stay healthy, and to have access to jobs eventually. So then they will themselves either move to another neighbourhood or build something which is better. Again, I think my chapter on the Kampung in Indonesia in my book illustrates this very well.Tobi; I'm going to come back to cities as labour markets later, which is one of the most powerful insights I got from your book. So we're talking about housing. For example, in Nigeria, it is popularly reported that we have a housing deficit of 17 million households, there are many independent estimates that put the number higher than that. So how do we, especially, in the face of rapidly increasing urbanization… how do we increase urban housing at a big enough scale? Do we have to democratize land markets in some of these cities? For example, in Nigeria, we have a Land Use Act that places the ownership of land solely in the hands of government, though there is an informal land market but it's, of course, largely informal. So do we have to democratize ownership? And would you say the ideas of Hernando de Soto will be useful here, like, we need to absorb more people into the formal land registry?Alain; Right, yeah, I like your idea of democratizing the land market. That's exactly what you have to do. Now how do you do that? I will give you an example. In Indonesia where I worked again, when the government started investing in the Kampungs, which were slums at the time, you know, pretty bad slumps, actually, but providing the infrastructure in those slums, you know, I was working for the World Bank at the time. And we insisted that they should survey this informal area, and give tenure to everybody, even people who had only say 10 square meters of land. And then the Indonesian told us, that will cost a lot of money, it will be very, very long to do because, you know, all the streets are crooked and things like that it's very difficult to survey. And they say, why don't we just accept the informal market. And it took a long time for us to accept, and then we accepted it. And then we realized that after people were giving water, you know, clean running water in those slums, they had a bill to pay for water. And the bill was a substitute for tenure because they have an address. You have an informal market which becomes formal, because it was legal, because people could do it. So you have to legalize. It doesn't mean necessarily that we have to have a registry in the cadastral, in the formal cadastral, because that may take 20 years. In a way, the Kampung in Indonesia, you could consider an entire neighbourhood as a condominium. So it's a condominium and within this condominium, you establish the rules which are specific to the condominium. And then let people trade. They know what is the boundary of their lot, usually, they're very small. And everybody knows that and says, if you have three or four witnesses, you will have a piece of paper. And little by little, then you could formalize it. But I think that recognizing the informal trading of land, making it legal, and including, by the way, we found then in the Kampung that even banks now accept as a title, just the water bill. you know, there is a water bill, Mr So and so during last five years had paid this water bill at this address, and you know, you don't have the former survey, but you know, the lot is, say 50 square meter, and a bank will accept that as collateral, because it's recognized by the government, it's not going to be bulldozed. The problem with informal settlements is that sometimes the government will just go through and bulldoze that area, or put a highway through, and do not compensate people because they do not recognize the legitimacy of their claim. And so if you do that, then, of course, you create an enormous uncertainty on tenure. You do not encourage people to invest in their own neighbourhood. And of course, banks will never touch it, because you know, if they learn something, and then a highway goes through and there is no compensation. So I think that integrating the informal sector, not necessarily making it formal in the sense that they have to follow the same rule as the formal, but have special role for the informal sector to make it legal. And then look at land use regulation. That's been my problem all over the world. And that's true, by the way, in New York or Paris, that there are standards for housing which are not really reflective of what people want. For instance, in New York, the government imposed by regulation, larger apartments than what people want. You know, there are a lot of people now in New York who are living alone who are a small couple with only one child or no child and the regulation do not reflect that, that those people will be very happy to live in a studio and they are not allowed to build a studio. So I think it's the same in developing countries. If you are poor, you can live with your family in 10 square meters, but if that 10 square meters is close to jobs and have, again, access to clean water, and if there is a school nearby, this is what is important. And you should be able to live there legally, you know, legally without the threat of being exploited or things like that. And again, you know, you were mentioning at the beginning housing deficits, right. I don't believe in housing deficit. Deficit is only, what is your minimum standard for a house? Have you measured all the houses in Lagos to know which ones are below the standard? And what are your minimum standards? You know, is it 10 square meters? Is it 100 square meters? Do you need two bathrooms? For instance, the UN have this thing, I think you have to have, I think it's one room per person or one-half person per room or something like that. And if it's below that, it's a slum, and it's informal. It's a deficit in the housing, I don't think it is. By definition, all the people who live in Lagos live in something they can afford. The problem with housing is that they can afford very, very little, and there's no water and no electricity, maybe, I don't know. And so you have to increase the consumption of housing of the people who are already living there, it is not a question of saying this is not housing, we need to build a new house somewhere to compensate for this house. So I think that the idea of deficit, you know, doesn't lead you to good policy. It's too abstract. You could say, you know, in Lagos, for instance, we can produce only, I don't know, 20 litres of clean water per capita, per day. And so we want, of course, to increase it to, for instance, 60 or 80 or 100. And then you will need to bring more clean water or use more clean water in Lagos, that's legitimate. Let's say you have a deficit of water in the sense that you want to increase the consumption of water. Now, when you do that, you will have to look at the income distribution curve within the city, you know, but in my book, I have several of those curves, and you will have to see if you increase the supply of water in Lagos, you have to make sure that the ones who increase their consumption are the ones now who consume very little. And so you increase their consumption. So you have to measure the consumption of these different groups. Clearly to increase consumption is not to build more houses. And people will build [for] themselves more houses if there is enough land with infrastructure. So the goal of the city is to develop more land with infrastructure.Tobi;So urban planners are by nature very practical people, but I'm going to ask you a bit of an abstract question. Do you think part of the problem with this housing thing is that on some level we do not really respect or extend that abstract idea of property rights to poor people? Is that part of the problem?Alain;Absolutely. Absolutely. I think there is a paternalism, let's say, of the elite, who consider that poor people will always be dependent on a social program. And in a way, you have a society that largely lives on markets. But then you try to condemn the poor into a kind of non-market things, you know, like putting them in public housing or saying well, wait for public housing, we are going to provide you with public housing, you know, don't worry about it. So they are in a socialist system with no property rights. You know, their property rights is going to be given to them by the government, it's not something they will acquire by themselves. So you have these two societies, and then it creates a poverty trap for the poor, you know, they cannot escape because they never accumulate capital. They cannot invest in their own house because their house belongs to the government, [it] doesn't belong to them. So I think that, yes, it's a problem of poverty right. And very often also, many cities have colonized poverty right only if you have a lot developed very formally of a certain size, you know, they will not allow people to own land if the parcel is not at least 200 square meter or 500 square meters, I don't know. And this is not correct. You know, if somebody owns 100 square meters, you should recognize that this ownership is 100 square meters because if not, if you put this minimum threshold of ownership, that means you exclude from ownership half of the population of your city, and you make them live in a non-market economy while the rest of the economy is working on the markets.Tobi; Let's talk a bit about density. So when I travel to New York City, I enjoyed the fact that from my hotel, I can access a cafe, I can access the cinema, I can go to my appointments, possibly all within a walking distance of 15 to 20 minutes. Alain; Yes.Tobi; That is something that I don't have in my city. Sometimes if I want to see a movie from my house, I have to drive two, sometimes two and a half hours. So how can cities in... I don't like that phrase developing world, but that's what I'll use for now. I don't like it. So how can our cities, and by us I mean cities like Lagos and co., better optimize for density or [as] I'm also seeing, ideas by some other planners or thinkers in that space saying that perhaps some of these cities have to give up on the idea of density altogether? So?Alain; Controlling densities, yeah, you see, every land use regulation, control density, tend to put density down, always. You have a minimum lot size. So some people would like to have a small lot, but they are obliged to have a bigger lot because that's the regulation. And then you have the floor ratio or maximum height of buildings. I think that the height of buildings should be removed. So planners say ah, ah but if we do that, we will not have the infrastructure to serve higher densities. Infrastructure is much cheaper than land, always. Much cheaper than land. So what engineers are doing, they are saying, Hey, you have now a water pipe, which is only that big. Therefore, the density cannot be more than that, because we will not have enough water if the density increases. But they are making a trade-off between land and the price of your pipe. And land is more expensive, and more useful. So I think that if they let the density increase, of course, they have to have a system of taxation on land. But again, if they recognize the ownership of land to a lot of people, they can have a type of property tax or something like that which will allow them to have the resource to pay for the infrastructure. And it's always cheaper to increase the level of infrastructure in [an] existing area, to increase the capacity than to expand further away. So if your regulation restricts densities, it means that people will have to build somewhere else, you know, further away. And they're not going to leave the city because the planners say the density here is restricted to that, they are going to stay there but they are going to live further away and at lower densities. So many of those regulations should be audited. I'm not saying that all regulations are bad, not at all, I think the markets need regulation. But the regulation which regulates consumption, that the people themselves can see... you know, if I go into a studio which is 20 square meter, I know it's 20 square meters, if I want to rent it to buy it, this is my business, the government do not have to tell me, No, no, a studio has to be certain square meter, or at least you cannot buy 20 square meters, this is absurd. Let the consumer decide what is best for them. Because then they can... you know, the problem you were mentioning, they can make a trade-off between living in a smaller house but closer to amenities, or a large house far away from everything, you know, some people may prefer that. So regulation restricts the choice. And of course, regulation, because they have this minimum consumption standards, if you look at the income distribution curve, those minimum construction housing standards have a cost. So they eliminate automatically, maybe 50% of the population from anything formal. You know, informality is really created by regulation. It's not created by anything else.Tobi; I want to talk about, perhaps, maybe, there is a kind of market failure in trying to deliver density. Devon Zuegel, I'm sure you're aware [because] she is your friend, wrote...Alain; She's my friend, yes. Tobi; She wrote a blog post a couple of days ago...Alain; I read it, yes.Tobi; Very interesting. I found it very interesting. And while read in that I, because i liked it...Alain; Yeah, Devon, in the last line of her thing [blog], she says, I have not discussed regulation. And my experience is that most of the inconsistencies or contradictions of densities in cities are due to regulations. And I will argue with her about that. You know, that she has to do a blog on regulation.Tobi; I would love to read that because while internalizing the idea she was putting forward, I thought about my street. So I live on a beautiful street. There is access to a major road and so many other amenities. it's gated well secured and all that. But we have just nine houses. Landlords built these huge compound houses. And I can't help but think, every time I go back and forth, that this is an area that can actually house a lot more people. So would you say that's a failure of markets because I think that equilibrium came to be because the first settlers on my streets prefer building for space as opposed to access?Alain; Yeah, but that's not a failure of markets. The market is a mechanism. It's not a god, it's not a religion, it's a mechanism. So here you have people in your compound who live there because they enjoy having low density. And I hope that they paid for it, they didn't steal the lot. So they paid for it? And so that reflects the market. At a certain point, if there is demand for higher density there, a developer will come to your compound and say, I'm making a deal with you, you know, I will give you that much money, and we are going to build more houses here. Unless. Unless there is a regulation which says you cannot have more houses there, or unless the water company tell you, we will never provide enough water in this area for higher density. You know, there are market failures, by the way, but I don't think that density is part of market failures. I think the market predicts rational densities if they are free to [build]. So let us talk about market failure. For instance, pollution is a market failure, you know, there is no way to decrease pollution directly through markets. I mean, you can do it by taxing polluting cars more than non-polluting cars, you know, this you can do, but you have to address it through market mechanism. But the market itself is not going to create a non-polluting thing. The same with global warming, you know, you have to price carbon. The government has to put a price on carbon because the market will not go into putting a price on carbon. That's clear. And then for major infrastructure, for instance, say, if a large city like Lagos needs more water, you know, enough water, clean water for everybody, you need major work to get the water somewhere - from a river, from a deep well, I don't know. And this major work is not going to be created by markets. The government could use a private company to do it. But the initiative has to come from the government, to say we need that many millions of cubic meters of water in the next 10 years. And our engineers say that to do that, we need to have, say, deep well, or whatever water plants, and that will cost that many million dollars. And that will be recovered from taxation. So it could be tax on land, it could be tax on income tax, I don't know. And then we have to do this major work somewhere in the city or in the suburb of the city where you will have the water plant. So all this is not done by markets, the total amount of water which will be brought to [households] has to be done by government, it has to be planned. And after, you will allow the land market to work. If you are allowed to put a network of pipes with water everywhere, including in areas which are not yet developed, including areas which have very low density but could not densify without more water.Tobi; Finally on housing before I move on, do you think that some of [the] newer propositions or technologies like blockchain, for example, hold any promise in terms of land registration, and generally democratizing property rights in cities?Alain; It's quite possible. I am not knowledgeable about [blockchain]. I'm very interested and intrigued by blockchain but I have not seen an example yet. But it's quite possible that yes, this could do it. Yes. You know, at the beginning I was talking about the problem of formal cadastral you know, the traditional property rights [that is] given the cadastral way [where] you have a surveyor from the government who starts taking [measuring] things, and this is very slow, it's very costly to do. It's possible that there are better ways of doing it. And it's possible that blockchain will be [it] but I've not seen an example yet, but it's possible and it might be a good way to start in a city like Lagos, just to try it, see [if it works].Tobi; Interesting. So let's talk about charter cities. I know you're very good friends with Paul Romer. I became intrigued by the idea when I first saw his presentation. And I've sort of followed how that idea developed. But first of all, why do you think some of these projects failed? The one in Honduras and Madagascar? Yeah. What do you think were the pitfalls?Alain; Because government were not ready to allow a [...] charter city, they saw that as just a new real estate development, and they thought that they could control it. And if the existing government control it, it means it's going to be a traditional city, it's not going to be a charter city. I think that in Honduras it was very clear. In Madagascar, I'm less aware of the details. But in Honduras, I follow the [development]. By the way, there are several new charter cities in Honduras now, I'm curious to see if they will succeed or not. Actually, Devon is involved in one of them. And I'm curious... sometimes I'm a little uneasy when I see that one of the first things that the promoter of a new charter city [does] is asking a big architect to put the design first. To me, a charter city is, again, developed land, and the possibility that you were talking about the beginning, democratising land ownership. That means that if you move to a charter city, and you want to open a small restaurant where you will sell sandwiches to workers, you should be able to either rent or buy a little piece of land where you will build your restaurant. You should not go through the government and say I want to open a restaurant, please give me a permit. So for me, a charter city is first a layout of streets, not building, you know, it's a layout of streets where you can buy very small pieces of land. And you can buy some big one, you know, maybe a department store or an office building so they want a big lot, that's fine. But there should be small lots available to people who move there. Because, again, the indispensable people are not only bankers and architects and lawyers. Indispensable people are the people making sandwiches. And so I think that one of the problems is that they have to start with the layout, and making land available to all sorts of people, including very small lots. And I think that will work. Now, my argument was Paul for the first part of your question, but when we first discuss it, you know, when we started working together, and he told me, well, we think that we could do 50 charter cities, you know. My first reaction is, cities are dictated by location and there are no more locations for 50 cities. The good locations are all taken. So if you want to start from scratch, you go to the countryside, and, you know, you have some farmers there even and you say, Oh, the land is very cheap there because there is nothing, why don't we do a charter city? In Lagos land is so expensive. Don't forget that a city is people, it's not the sewers. You're not going to move to a city because it has a nice sewer system, you are going to move to a city because there are jobs, because there are other people you want to work with or be friends with. So the problem with any new city is, who is the first one? Would you leave Lagos for, let's take NEOM in Saudi Arabia (the city that the Saudis want to build) Tobi; Yeah. Alain; So if I told you, okay, in NEOM we could give you a house for $50,000 and it has this fantastic infrastructure. Would you leave Lagos to go there? Unless you know how many people are already there? Are you going to move by yourself or with your family? And you don't know if the schools are working? You don't know if there are restaurants or bars there, you know, [finding] bars in Saudi Arabia is always a problem. [laughs]And so you see, that's the problem. I have an example to explain the problem of a new city. In South Korea, they thought that Seoul was too large, and they thought that they would build a satellite town which will be self-sufficient. So they calculate how many jobs they will need, how much housing and the Koreans are very good at that, they really planned it extremely well, it was financed very well too. They matched exactly the number of jobs and they use the demographic, everything. And they're very good at logistics too. So they built the school, the sewer, the transport, the buses, all at the same time and well done. And it was nice architecture. So the idea was it will be self-sufficient [and] that the people who live there will work there. When the city is fully built and inhabited, they found that 90% of the people who live there commute to Seoul. They work in Seoul, but they live in the New City; and the people who have jobs there, they come from Seoul, they live in Seoul but they work in the New City. Why that? Why didn't they manage to match the thing? It's a question of the first inhabitants. When the plan is finished and the thing is ready to be sold, they told firms in Korea, well, you know, if you want to establish yourself here, you could have a factory of this and it will cost that much and you will pay that much more for electricity, So very attractive. So the firms say, Hey, we are in Seoul right now, but we want to expand, and in Seoul, we cannot expand because land is too expensive, so let's move to this new city where we'll something more modern. Now, these firms, if they have the money to move to the new city, completely new, it means that they already have employees, they have [an existing] business. So they are not going to fire their employees and say we are going to recruit entirely new employees. So the employees which are already in Seoul, working in the old site are going to commute to this. Now, why don't they say oh, we have this new job there and we are going to move into an apartment in the new city? Because where they are now, maybe they have their mother-in-law who is babysitting their kid and they cannot move. Or maybe they have a school that they like a lot for their children. And they don't want to move their children to a new school which has no record. You know, there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to move, or maybe because there are a couple and one of them is working in the neighbourhood and do not want to commute. So the new firms are attracting existing employees from outside and the people who take housing there... you know, if you are a young couple in Seoul, you are desperately looking for a new apartment, but it's too expensive and suddenly, they propose you a nice apartment in the new city... Now, you will need an hour 20-minute commute but you think well, this is a really nice apartment, there will be a nice school so you move there with your family. But your job is in Seoul, you know, because if you can afford an apartment in the new city it's because you already have a job. So you're not going to quit your job and say, Well, I've moved to the new city, I'm going to look for a job in the New City. Maybe after 20 years, you will do that. But initially, you won't. So you see this is a problem of new cities and that will include charter cities unless the charter city becomes so attractive in terms of, again, the democratization of land use, and of property rights. But again, you have the problem of the first mover, you see. So that's why cities like maybe Abuja or Brasilia are successful because they are civil servants so they are obliged to go there. And the government pays for it and all the taxpayers, by the way, all the taxpayers of Nigeria are paying for Abuja.Tobi; Yeah, that much is true. Alain; Yeah. And this is true also for Brasilia, you know, the people who live in Brasilia are not paying for their infrastructure, it's the Brazilians who live in Recife or Rio de Janeiro who are paying for that. So, you see, those examples are not very good examples - the new capitals. The other thing which is very difficult, and I saw that when I was working in China in a new economic zone which usually piggybacks on a city is the cash flow. You know, when you build a new city, there are certain things that are discrete, you know, for instance, you cannot build a sewer plant for 500 people, you are obliged to build a sewer plant for at least 10,000 people or 20,000 people and when you build that you have to spend for 10,000 people but you will not get 10,000 people before five or six years. So you pay interest on this capital for five or 10 years. So you have a negative cash flow for a long time and that is [for] the sewer plant but that's true for schools, that's true for roads, that's true for the water system, that's true for garbage removal, you know. You need right away to bring trucks to remove the garbage to treat it and before you have [enough] inhabitants. So you have to pay a lot of interest. My experience in developing a new economic zone in China was that the cost of interest during construction (that means the cost of interest before the lots were sold to the private sector) represents sometimes 40% of the entire expenditure. So this negative cash flow, if it's a private city, by the way, you have bankers, so the banker, let's say, trusts you. And they say, all right, you have planned to have, say 1000 people, the second year at 10,000 people, the fifth year... and then 100,000 people in 15 years. So they trust your business plan, but then imagine that it's a little slow at coming. So you are borrowing more and more money, and at the same time the bankers get cold feet, and they say, we are not going to go roll over your loan, because you know, your thing… it's too risky, you are accumulating a negative cash flow much longer than we thought. And then they will cut your finance, and then you will go bankrupt. And that's why the most successful new cities are capitals because the entire country is paying the bill, you know, money was no object.Tobi; Does this mean you're bearish on private cities generally? So I'll give you some examples. And I'll try to be brief. For example, in Lagos, there was this project called the Eko Atlantic project. This was a land that was basically reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean, it raised $6 billion, right. And at the end of the day, they ended up building office buildings for oil companies, banks and skyscraper apartments that cost $2 million. Almost nobody goes there to work, which fails the labour market condition in my view, right. There was also the story of Gurgaon, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right. In India... Alain; A suburb of Delhi. Yes, yes.Tobi; Yeah. So, where, maybe it was partly driven by the labour market, the tech workers and private firms. But we saw that they could not deliver on things like the sewer system... public goods investments failed woefully. But the common thread in some of these narratives and initiatives, and of course, you know that private cities are very, very hot right now in Silicon Valley...Alain; Yes. SureTobi; Is to look at Shenzhen and say, oh, yeah, this was a fishing village of 30,000 people... Alain; Yes, yes. Right. Yeah. Tobi; And it's now the manufacturing capital of the world, the centre of technology with 50 million people. So are you bearish on private cities generally, that was one? Secondly, what are we missing from the Shenzhen story?Alain; You know, Shenzhen by the way, I know it well, because when it was a little more than a fishing village, I was working for the World Bank… the Chinese invited me there with the team. We were five or six planners and economists. So at the time, it was about 300,000 people, but dispersed, it was not really a big city. And they say we want to build the city of, at the time they say, 4 million people and we want the World Bank to finance it. And this is one skeleton in my closet. I told them you are too ambitious. If you want to build a city of two million, up to 2 million, you know, I made a back of an envelope calculation, I say look 2 million is a city is so large, so fast [and] would be impossible because of logistics. You will not have enough trucks, it will be impossible and I was wrong. So after that, I followed because I was spectacularly wrong. I followed what happened in Shenzhen I went there regularly and you know what created Shenzhen? First, location. You know I was telling you at the beginning [about] location. They have a deep port. A natural deep port in Shenzhen and you know the rocks are going there. And it's next to Hong Kong. Hong Kong port is already saturated. They are at a coveting distance from Hong Kong. So when they want somebody very specialized - an architect, an engineer - at the time when they built it, that was in '83, you know, when I was there, '83-'84, the needed manpower will commute from Hong Kong. They will spend maybe the night in Shenzhen and go back. And then you have the Pearl River Delta on the other side of Hong Kong, you had Guangzhou, you know, which is a very important city too. So, they are in between. Now. The major thing which did the success of Shenzhen was Deng Xiaoping [who] for the first time in the history of China, put a line around Shenzhen and say within this area, the firms are going to pay the workers according to [the] market, and people who come to Shenzhen will negotiate their salary with their employers, depending on their skill. In China before that, if you were, say, a geologist, at 30 years old, the government will say your pay is this per month, period. If you are a welder, the government will say, for entire China, this is your pay, and the government will decide where you will be employed. You have no labour market, there was no labour market in China, you know, people were unemployed, but the government tells them where to [work]. Even the kid coming out of high school, the government will say you're going to work in this factory for the rest of your life. Now, in Shenzen, for the first time, you had the labour market, and a lot of Chinese coming from the north, from all over China (the ones who were the most courageous, you know, [it's] a bit like migrants coming to Lagos are the most courageous in a way that, you know, it's a selection of people) they decided that they were trusting their own skill, they say, we'd rather work and negotiate our salary and change employment when we want rather than stay with it. So you had an influx of people, of talent, from all over China. And that's why, you know, Shenzhen is in an area where everybody speaks Cantonese, normally, you know, in the south of China, like Hong Kong or Guangzhou, but you will find that, in Shenzen, most people speak Mandarin, because they came from all over China. They didn't [all] come from there, [the southern part]...some people from Guangzhou, obviously, from the Pearl River Delta, but say the language that you hear the most is Mandarin because they came from all over. So, you see, what created the enormous success of Shenzhen was the market. It was the labour market. It was the first time you had the labour market in China. And then after that, they used experiment, and you had that, you know. And by the way, housing, also… it was the first housing on the market that people will be paid at the market price, but then with their salary, they will have to pay for housing. Where before in China, housing was provided by your employer entirely. That means that you have no mobility and you have no capital either, by the way. You cannot leave your job because if you leave your job, you have no savings, and you have no house. So that's the story of Shenzhen, and do not forget the location. Look at the container port of Shenzhen, it is one of the best in the world and it's because location, you know, it's even better than Hong Kong. It's larger than Hong Kong's. In Hong Kong, they have to do a lot of land reclamation, whereas [in Shenzhen], it's natural. They don't need to dredge it or anything, you know, it's a natural beauty. So that's the story. So I am not bearish. You know, I like the idea of trying new cities and private cities, I think that's a good thing. But let's say, you know, just to think that if you have a good infrastructure, you know, [when] building [a] new city, they say, Oh, we will have this fantastic system for removing garbage by vacuum and things like that, this is good and well. If the city is reasonably clean, that's good enough, you know, and you don't move to a city because the garbage is vacuumed. You move to a city because there is a good job, the city's attractive, you have bars, cinemas, and you know, whatever, if you'd like to go jogging or things like that, you have nice parks. But you move to a city mostly because of the people who live there. So the question of new cities, how do you attract a lot of people right away in the beginning? Who will be the guinea pig to live in this new city? And then there is the financial aspect, you know, this cash flow, you need to have a lot of money in advance to finance it because bankers will get cold feet. Maybe I've been talking too much and not [...] enough questions. I enjoy it. That was very interesting. I hope maybe we can do it again sometime.Tobi; Okay. Thank you very much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

This week Oliver interviews Laura Fox, General Manager of the Citi Bike bike sharing service in New York, and Senior Director of Lyft Bikes. This podcast was also released on our sister podcast project, Infinite Block.Laura has a very deep background and thinking about the future of cities, not only in an operational sense - running a Micromobility firm, before that working for Sidewalk Labs for Google and working with former world bank urban economist, with whom she edited one of Oliver's favourite books on urban economics “Order Without Design.” In this episode, Laura talks with Oliver about the implications of Micromobility on the city and also new forces calling upon her background at Sidewalk Labs, and consulting on the interplay of regulations and housing supply in Mexico City with Alain Bertaud.In this weeks episode, they talk specifically about:- How Citi Bike is a novel means of accessing high performance city vehicles, but it's highly dependent on government interventions for things like street space, allocation and funding. What would happen if NYC voted in a new council that took Citi Bike very seriously as a transport option? - Laura reflects on her time at Sidewalk Labs: What went well, and whether their new focus on software enabled tools is a step down. - A city often builds up complex regulations over time, and that deregulation, especially around things like zoning and building codes (for example in Mexico) can unlock cities to be more responsive to their citizens. Oliver and Laura discuss how this can be achieved. - Where are there cities who are not as fast at responding to tech advances, and how the process can be accelerated. - How we can trust in governance in an age of quicker change, and what countries are doing this well.- Whether there have been any alternative methods for infrastructure funding that have been successful. Check out Citi Bike and their developments within New York right hereOur sponsor for this episode is Joyride.

This week Oliver interviews Laura Fox, General Manager of the Citi Bike bike sharing service in New York, and Senior Director of Lyft Bikes.    Laura has a very deep background and thinking about the future of cities, not only in an operational sense - running one of the worlds leading micromobility operations, but also before that working for Sidewalk Labs for Google and with former world bank urban economist Alain Bertaud, with whom she edited one of Oliver's favourite books on urban economics “Order Without Design.”   In this episode, Laura talks with Oliver about the implications of micromobility on the city and also new forces calling upon her background at Sidewalk Labs, and consulting on the interplay of regulations and housing supply in Mexico City with Alain.   Listen in, and learn more about Citi Bike right here.

With the housing market still hot as a red poker despite an uptick in interest rates, Nolan Gray, in a recent article from Bloomberg's CityLab, explores the idea of building brand-new cities (in the mode of 21st-century China or the Brasilia of the latter 20th century) to address the housing crisis. Alain Bertaud, a fellow at the Marron Institute for Urban Management and a former city planner at the World Bank, engages with Gray in this published interview to explain whether or not this is a realistic solution.  Host Abby Kinney and her co-host Charles Marohn of Strong Towns chew it over in this episode of Upzoned.  “Historically, infrastructure follows the market, not the other way around,” Kinney notes. “Huge public investments in infrastructure where there are no jobs are not really a very smart investment because the upfront costs of building an entire city's worth of infrastructure are so incredibly high. The public sector would have to be in a negative cash flow for a very long time.” Marohn talks about places where this has actually been done, with the government fronting the money for infrastructure and subsidizing individuals through mortgages and commercial real estate loans. “They fail in every financial metric that is longer than the immediate sugar high you get out of the transaction,” he says.  There are interesting examples, as both hosts discuss, but it's hard to beat an organically grown, incrementally developed city, where historic trial and error has made places that work. Where do you fall on this question? Additional Show Notes “The Problem With Building a New City From Scratch,” by Nolan Gray, CityLab (April 2022). Abby Kinney (Twitter) Charles Marohn (Twitter) Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

Cidade Jardim, Modernismo, cidade para pessoas, Transit Oriented Development, Novo Urbanismo, Cidade de 15 Minutos... Neste episódio, recebemos Alain Bertaud — para nós, o maior urbanista da atualidade — para conversar sobre as ideias e utopias sobre o planejamento urbano e sua evolução ao longo do tempo. Apoie o Caos Planejado. Confira os links do episódio no site. Episódio produzido com o apoio de TrashIn.

Il y a des noms comme ça. Si vous travaillez sur le design, vous rêvez d'interviewer Philippe Starck ; si c'est sur la ville, c'est Alain Bertaud.  Et m'y voilà, épisode 13 de Felicity, la joie immense d'entendre cet expert, mondialement reconnu, la gratitude envers lui de m'accorder ce temps, lui professeur associé à l'université de New York à l'issue d'une cinquantaine d'années de travail sur des métropoles aussi différentes que Bangkok ou Saint-Pétersbourg. Alain Bertaud a passé un demi-siècle à aider les villes à se réinventer, du Harlem new-yorkais des années 1960 au Shanghai d'après Mao.  Précédemment urbaniste en chef à la banque mondiale pendant près de 20 ans, une vie de voyage et d'étude du fonctionnement des villes plus tard ; son dernier ouvrage Order without design est un appel à la modestie quant à l'action publique sur les villes. Il interroge en particulier le lien entre les marchés économiques et la ville.  Alors j'ai questionné Alain Bertaud sur l'impact des plateformes sur les villes, le futur du transport urbain, la tendance aux initiatives citoyennes, … Alain fait peu d'intervention en français, c'est donc une chance de l'entendre dans sa langue natale. Et comme souvent avec les personnalités vraiment brillantes, son discours est d'une clarté et d'une simplicité déconcertante, et sa passion pour la ville communicative.  Ressources citées :  Dernier ouvrage d'Alain Bertaud: Order without design, How markets shape cities le projet Neom L'épisode du podcast Conversation with Tyler avec Alain Bertaud  L'image de la Cité de Kevin Lynch Paris from the air, de Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Arpit Gupta, Take the Q Train: Value Capture of Public Infrastructure Projects Arpit Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business and the co-author of Take the Q Train: Value Capture of Public Infrastructure Projects. Chris Severen, Senior Economist at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank and author of Commuting, Labor, and Housing Market Effects of Mass Transportation: Welfare and Identification and Ticket to Ride: Estimating the Costs and Benefits of Rail Transit, joins as guest co-host. Appendices: Arpit Gupta: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, by Alain Bertaud. Greg Shill: Two working papers by Arpit Gupta, Racial Disparities in Frontline Workers and Housing Crowding During COVID-19: Evidence from Geolocation Data and Urban Flight Seeded the COVID-19 Pandemic Across the United States. See also Urban Flight video abstract here. Jeff Lin: The Economics of Speed:The Electrification of the Streetcar System and the Decline of Mom-and-Pop Stores in Boston, 1885-1905 by Wei You, and a Jonathan Dingel’s annual collection of job-market candidates whose JM papers fall within spatial economics, Spatial economics JMPs (2020-2021). Chris Severen: Trains, Buses, People An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit, by Christof Spieler. Follow us on the web or on Twitter: @denselyspeaking, @jeffrlin, @greg_shill, @arpitrage, @ChrisSeveren. Producer: Schuyler Pals. The views expressed on the show are those of the participants, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Federal Reserve System, or any of the other institutions with which the hosts or guests are affiliated.

Interviews with Emily Hamilton, Nolan Gray, and Alain Bertaud about how cities thrive under free markets rather than detailed planning.

In normal times, cities are an engine of prosperity. In these strange times, they are also an engine of pandemic. Vaidehi Tandel joins Amit Varma in episode 191 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss how important cities are to civilisation, and how Covid-19 will affect the way we live. Also check out: 1. COVID-19 a Grim Reminder for Govts -- Vaidehi Tandel. 2. Don’t Blame Dense Cities. They Have Been Resilient -- Reuben Abraham and Vaidehi Tandel. 3. Why India Has the Fastest-Growing Cities -- Kadambari Shah, Vaidehi Tandel and Harshita Agarwal. 4. Cities and Pandemics Have a Long History -- Edward L Glaeser 5. A World of Cities: The Causes and Consequences of Urbanisation in Poorer Countries -- Edward L Glaeser. 6.  Cities After Coronavirus: How Covid-19 Could Radically Alter Urban Life -- Jack Shenker.   7.  Spatial Economics: The Declining Cost of Distance -- Karen Harris, Andrew Schwedel and Austin Kimson.   8. Triumph of the City -- Edward L Glaeser. 9. Order Without Design – How Markets Shape Cities -- Alain Bertaud. 10. The Importance of Cities -- Episode 108 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Reuben Abraham & Pritika Hingorani.) 11. The Seen and the Unseen episodes with Alex Tabarrok on FSI and Rent Control. 12. Urban Governance in India -- Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 13. Taking Stock of Covid-19 -- Episode 169 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 14. The Nuances of Lockdown -- Episode 176 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Anup Malani). 15. India’s Economy in the Time of Covid-19 -- Episode 177 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 16. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 17. What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been -- Episode 188 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arvind Subramanian). 18. Rajesh Jain and Dhan Vapasi -- Episode 94 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajesh Jain). 19. Publish and Perish -- Agnes Callard. 20. Young Rural Women in India Chase Big-City Dreams -- Ellen Barry. 21. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma.

I had a chat with Mark Lutter, founder and executive director of Charter Cities Institutes about the potential of charter cities to boost a nation’s prosperity and development. Our conversation touched on state capacity, why American institutions appear to be failing, and why Silicon Valley elites have no political influence.You can download or listen right in the player above - or from your favourite players and podcast providers here. You can rate us here, this helps others find the show. Reference guides by CCI for people new to the idea are here. You can also read my writings on cities (here and here). TranscriptTL: Welcome to Ideas Untrapped. Joining me is Mark Lutter. Mark Lutter is an economist and he is the founder and executive director of [the] Charter Cities Institute. You're welcome, Mark. ML: Thanks for having me on. TL: Yeah briefly, please. What are Charter Cities and what do they bring to economic development? ML: Sure, so Charter Cities are new cities with a special jurisdiction that allows them to have a more competitive business environment. And we believe they are important because, over the long run, they're a key determinant of economic performance, economic outcomes and […] governance. If you have good governance, a country will do relatively well and if you have poor governance, a country will do relatively poorly. The challenge can be that it's difficult to reform governance on a national level. There's a lot of special interests groups. There's a lot of politics that goes on that sometimes make the reforms quite difficult to implement. And, Charter Cities, because they're new cities, they can be built on Greenfield sites where there are fewer special interests and because they have a special jurisdiction, it can be politically feasible to implement deeper reforms than might be possible at the national level.So these deeper reforms are to improve the business environment combined with a new city allow for more economic development to occur than otherwise might take place. So if we look at the last 40, fifty, 60 years, we've seen cities like Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai emerge from practically nothing to become global metropolises. And we believe that success is replicable. Particularly because there are a little under 80 million new urban residents annually, so urbanization is growing extremely rapidly across Africa and across Asia, and we believe it's quite important to make sure that we get things right now because it's much harder to change governance, It's much harder to change infrastructure once a city is already built. And so we believe that if we can help set up this sort of right institutions now, the right set up now, the right layout of new cities now, it can basically save a lot of headaches over the next fifty [to] hundred years, and help lift tens of millions of people out of poverty and make things better for economic development. TL: Yeah, so, obviously, I'm not new to this idea and we've talked a couple of times about it. Thinking about Charter Cities, it's a big project. So what do you think are the effective financing structures that make them feasible knowing the fiscal challenges that some poor countries face?ML: Sure, so the way we think about Charter Cities is as Public-Private Partnerships with the host country. So we're not asking the host country to build the city, we're asking the host country to help create a governance framework that can make the Charter City more competitive. And we think that this is especially important now in the post-COVID world where a lot of countries, particularly in emerging markets might be resource dependent on oil and like Nigeria. Or copper, like Zambia. And prices have rebounded somewhat over the last few months, but given that they're much lower than they were a year ago, I think there is a reasonable expectation that demand will continue to be relatively low, at least, until a vaccine is discovered. And so that means these countries have big holes in their budget and will need new financing mechanisms and we view Charter Cities as potentially one of those financing mechanisms. Charter Cities, because they're new cities, they can be built on Greenfield sites where there are fewer special interests and because they have a special jurisdiction, it can be politically feasible to implement deeper reforms than might be possible at the national level - ML The Charter City would have a revenue-sharing agreement with the central government. It will be able to attract a lot of foreign investment, create a lot of economic activities, create a lot of jobs and then some of that wealth that is being created would be transferred to the central government that might be able to help plug the hole that is currently being left by low commodity prices. Additionally, we just think if you build a successful city, it will generate a tremendous amount of wealth. We're still in the early Charter Cities phases and the specifics for financing Charter Cities haven't all been sort of worked out, but the general hypothesis is 'look, if you create a successful, functioning city, then there will be a lot of wealth that is created and you just need to capture some of that wealth that can pay for the initial infrastructure investment that can pay for the costs associated with setting up and building a city. So, that's at least the eye level overview of how we think about financing Charter Cities.TL: The question of financing is important here because some would argue, and I think, Chris Blattman has actually made this argument that given the risks involved that these investments may not pay off, it's actually an objection to not doing it. How do you react to that? What are the big payoffs for charter cities as opposed to other development interventions like cash transfers and other forms of aid?ML: Sure, so, it's definitely possible that for one or more charter cities the investments will not pay off. That's the nature of an investment, they're not necessarily secure and so there is always risks associated with investments. The risks associated with charter cities might be higher depending on where the charter city is being built, depending on what the local politics are, depending on the sort of skill of the developer. But I think, I would, I guess, sort of, differentiate as to what we're talking about in terms of investment. So if we're talking about cash transfers. Cash transfers are not an investment per se. Cash transfers are a transfer of wealth. They are basically a donation. It is comparable to charity. And most of the evidence on cash transfers is relatively good. You give people more money, they're able to spend the money to get better things. Recent studies have suggested that this does have relatively long-lasting impact on improving people's lives, so I support cash transfers. Charter Cities, at least, the way we at the Charter Cities Institute conceive of them are led by private developers who are building the physical infrastructure themselves. So this is an investment, not a donation. The expectation is if you raise 700 million dollars to build a power plant, to build roads, to build water, electricity, etc, then you expect a return on that capital investment that can justify the risks associated with that particular project. So this is a commercial venture, not a development venture per se. And we believe that Charter Cities can pass this sort of commercial venture test where, okay, if people who are humanitarians want to get involved, that is great, but as a mechanism for social change, I think the profit motive tends to be important and can allow for more social change in a shorter period of time than asking everybody to change their behaviour out of the goodness of their heart. That being said, there is space for, I think, donations in the Charter Cities space. The Charter Cities Institute, for example, is a 501C3. We rely on donations. We are trying to kind of incubate this Charter Cities space, trying to bootstrap it, creating a network of different city developers, developing a set of best practices, things like that. But we have done at least internal calculations that we have published on the research portion of our website, where we look at GiveWell which is a well-known charity evaluator. And we look at GiveWell and the cost-effectiveness of various charities that they evaluate and based on some assumptions that we make about our own effectiveness and these assumptions, I believe, are quite conservative. We are comparable to the most cost-effective charities in the world; if not more effective than them. TL: Charter Cities, at least, as an idea, in its current framing, is not new. Paul Romer kind of reintroduced the idea a while back. And with implementation - Honduras, Madagascar - they've run into some problems. What are you doing differently at CCI, and how does your model differ from that proposition? ML: Sure, and that's a good question. So Paul Romer obviously pioneered this space but didn't have as much success as I think he would have liked. And what we've tried to do is learn from his impact and see how we could try to have a bit more success this time around. So first let me talk about differences with Paul Romer's model and our model for charter cities. The similarities are: both of the models involve cities with a special jurisdiction that allow them to have a different institutional framework than the rest of the country, an institutional framework that is more conducive to economic development, and to growth. Those are the similarities. I think the differences are that Paul Romer advocated a high-income country, for example, Canada administers a Charter City in a low-income country for example, Honduras. So Canada would help create the administrative structure, they would be responsible for it, and that is the mechanism by which part of Honduras could have good governance. We have not pursued that model for, I think, two reasons. One, we're not sure it's feasible. There is a lot of blowbacks associated with charter cities, we're sometimes accused of being neocolonialists, and I think having a high-income country act as a guarantor in a low-income country brings up some of those unpleasant historical memories that might make getting political buy-in a little bit more difficult. The second reason we're not pursuing that model is we're not sure it's the best model, even if you, sort of, assume away the political challenges of it. So looking at, for example, the response of many countries in the West to COVID, the US has had a relatively poor response to COVID. Our institutional capacity as somewhat decayed, we aren't as vibrant, as effective as we were 50, 60 years ago, there's a general lethargy in our own institutions, and I think that that lethargy would likely translate to helping to build new institutions in emerging markets. And so there is a question of 'is the high-income country the best institutional entity to help administer a charter city?' And we believe it is not. So what we do is we partner with new city developers. There are by Journalist Wade Shepherd...he estimates there are over 200 mass or fenced cities being built around the world right now. So we try to partner with these new city developers, typically private entities, sometimes they're public but we prefer our partner with the private ones because they tend to be a little bit more effective to figure out okay, they're building a new city which might have a hundred thousand residents, which might have a million residents, so we partner with them to try to improve their governance system. And this might mean working with the government to improve the special economic zone framework. If there is a relatively advanced special economic zone framework in place, we might work with the city developer to figure out okay, what does it actually mean to create this new administrative structure from scratch. So that's the difference in approach.I guess before I go into why I think we'll be effective, I think, a few other points. One, Paul Romer was quite effective at generating attention and, sort of, starting the conversation and working with governments, at least, up to a point. We're taking a bit more of what might be described as, sort of, a systematic approach. We're somewhat worried about the ecosystem of charter cities being too dependent on a single person or on a single country. So we try to diversify risk by partnering with a lot of different organizations, by working in a lot of different countries, by really helping to spread the idea of charter cities as far as possible such that if one project goes under a hard time or fails, there are other projects that we can shift our attention to make sure the momentum for charter cities is not lost. As to, I think why we think that we will be successful where he was unsuccessful, I think we've learned a lot from him; and in addition, I think the last 10 years, there's been a bit of an increased interest in charter cities. And then second, we're just seeing it on the ground. We have engaged two projects where we are helping them create these legal structures, these administrative entities from scratch to governing these cities. The projects have a degree of political buy-in. We are regularly reached out to by new city developers who are interested in improving governance in those cities. We're basically at the beginning of a charter city's moment, and I think over the next year, the next two years, it will become clear to everybody who isn't paying attention now that the charter city's moment is here, that these projects are real, people are building them, people are moving dirt, people are moving in, money is being raised, etc. that it is no longer just [an] academic discussion, but it is a matter of sort of on the ground, things happening and executing.TL: I mean, hearing you speak, I thought of a question, which is - to a layperson, like, what exactly are the channels of improvement to income and livelihoods in building a new city, for example?ML: Sure, so, If we look at a city like Shenzhen, 40 years ago in 1980, Shenzhen was a number of small fishing villages, the total population in the area was about a 100,000 residents. The average income was about $500 a year. It was a very impoverished area and currently, Shenzhen is the manufacturing capital of the world. It has a total population of around 20 million people, they have a subway system that rivals New York. It is a sort of, shiny, gleaming metropolis that really transformed in just 40 years. So while China had several sort of specific conditions that mean that the success of Shenzhen is unlikely to replicate at that magnitude. For example, China had first basically prevented urbanisation from occurring, so there was a pent up demand for urbanisation. As well as China had very stringent regulations and laws which had precluded a lot of economic development. And while Africa, for example, many countries have bad regulations, I'm not sure they were as bad as China in the 1980s. But that being said, we believe that a degree of that success is still possible even if you get half of Shenzhen, that's a city of ten million people, that sees your income rise by like 10, 20X over a 40 year period. That is a huge change. If you look in a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, what's occurring now is called urbanization without industrialization. And this means that people are moving to cities. And typically when people move to cities, they become more productive, they are able to make more money, they live better lives, they leave their kids better off, and it's this virtual circle. And now, unfortunately, in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa this is not occurring. People are moving into cities but their productivity is not increasing, they're not making more money, and their kids are going to stuck at the same sort of level in income and quality of life that they are today. And what we believe charter cities can help do is to, I guess, help change that to help create these opportunities for these people that are currently being left behind by the global economy and to create this positive dynamic, this positive feedback cycle that leads to people's incomes being increased by 5 percent per year, 10 percent per year. Which because of the power of compounding interest, if your income is increasing at 5 percent per year, that means, every 14 years, your income doubles. So 28 years later, your income will be four times what it was originally. Forty-two years later, which is about the total working life of an adult (about 42 years), your income will be 8 times what it was when you started. You've seen an 8 fold increase in income, [which] is just tremendous. So if we can help create that dynamic, if we can help generate this type of growth, I think that will lead toad to a big improvement in a lot of people's lives.TL: It's interesting you talked about Shenzhen before we move into the specifics of that. Shenzhen is usually described as a special economic zone. Is that different from Charter Cities, or is essentially the same thing? ML: Sure. So, Special Economic Zones. We consider Charter Cities to be a subset of Special Economic Zones. The special economic zone is just an area that says that the laws of the host country don't apply to this area, or like some subset of the laws. But typically, special economic zones tend to be relatively narrow in their focus. They might only encompass an industrial park, they might only be a few dozen or a few hundred acres. They have a relatively set degree of difference from the host country in terms of laws, so it might have lower taxes or it might have a one-stop-shop but they don't really have this deep regulatory reforms. They tend to focus on a single industry, so maybe textile, manufacturing or maybe electronics, they aren't broad-based. Very rarely do special economic zones have residential. And lastly, they tend to be too small to generate sustained economic growth. If you have an industrial park that might be successful, that might create a lot of jobs but that's not really going to create this dynamic positive feedback cycle like a city can. Shenzhen whilst frequently described as a special economic zone, at least, according to our definition, it is more like a charter city. The jurisdiction is 320 square kilometres, so that's the size of a city. It is multi-use. They have residential, they have commercial, they have industrial. They have the sort of full dynamics that you expect to see in a city with a lot of different economic parts moving. There was a lot of authority devolved from the central government to the city government. So while many special economic zones might only have like a tax incentive, basically in Shenzhen, with the exception of military and like Mail distribution, you can almost experiment with whatever you want you on the Shenzhen city level. And that allowed for a lot more autonomy than most special economic zones allow. So while Shenzhen is sort of colloquially referred to as a special economic zone, it fits our definition and our understanding of what a charter city is a little bit more closely than most special economic zones around the world which are quite different from Shenzhen and as such haven't had the same impact that Shenzhen has had.TL: Two-part Shenzhen question here. I agree with you, Shenzhen fits better with what you are describing. I mean, there was an industrial zone in Shekou, and of course, there was the whole area that was developed for all kinds of things, tourism and the rest. Now, the first question is that there was a lot of planning and execution in making Shenzhen work. How does the administrative capacity of the host country, how does it affect the execution of a Charter City?ML: Sure, and I think this is an important point. One of the increasing discussions in economics and international development has been focusing on state capacity in which the administrative capacity of a country or a government can be thought of as - are they able to execute on tasks in a timely and effective manner? So a country with this higher state capacity would be able to build a road cheaper and more quickly than a country with a lower state capacity. And in Shenzhen it was the local government that administered the city. China has had 3000 years [of] history of statehood. So they have a lot of experience in capacity with administrating cities and they just had to adapt it the circumstances at hand. And I think one of the challenges in some emerging markets is that there isn't that long history of statehood. There isn't that long history of administrative capacity, and so the current governments are not being very effective in administering the entire country. So if they start to administer a charter city, you would see a similar type of dysfunction. To solve this problem, we are advocating a special jurisdiction with a separate administration from the host country. And so the city would remain part of the host country, it would be governed by a separate bureaucratic apparatus, it would have different standards for hiring, different standards for firing, different standards for promotion, etc, which would allow it to develop a more effective administration than the host country. And so, to this end, we're engaged in [a] sort of early-stage discussion about helping to establish this administrative apparatuses and we're beginning to think about what it means to develop a pipeline of administrators for a Charter City that would help [to] work with educational establishment to create certificates, to create courses that might help teach you how to administer a charter city. 'Cause this is sort of a monumental challenge, there are so many moving parts and you don't really want to hire people from the host country because then they bring the bad culture of the host country government, they bring the sort of, I don't know… the sclerosis that often exists in host countries' bureaucracies that leads to the need for charter cities. But you don't want to transplant that bureaucratic dysfunction to the charter city, so you would have to basically create a new administrative system and a new education system to train those administrators. TL: Yeah, so with the special jurisdiction, what guarantees continuity? I'm imagining that the government of the host country would still have some form of authority over that jurisdiction however limited. And what guarantees that another administration does not come in and say, 'Oh, yeah, well, for political reasons or whatever, we're going to withdraw our support for this.' Or is there a specific framework that you've outlined which guarantees long-term autonomy?ML: Sure. I'm glad you asked that question, that is one of the challenges for charter cities. How do you ensure that there is administrative continuity in the charter city and the host country hasn't changed their mind and limit some of the authority that they had previously granted to the charter city? We are seeing that, for example, right now in Hong Kong, where the Chinese government is passing a national security law that many on Hong Kongers believe changed the sort of terms of the agreement in 1997 when Hong Kong was transferred from the British to the Beijing government. There is no silver bullet for preventing, right? You can't do a magic trick and say 'alright, there is no risk of expropriation of the charter city' but there are a number of strategies that can be developed to mitigate that risk, and in fact, we published an outline of these strategies on our website called the Risk Mitigation Guide. It is in the reference guides. And it should give an understanding of strategies that can be taken to mitigate that risk. So basically, they're business project, they need to be profitable while obviously they're political projects as well. They need to get buy-in from the host country and so there are several ways to do that. First, you need to make sure that the development of the charter city itself has an extensive stakeholder management engagement in the planning processes. So you need to work closely with the host country at the central government, you probably want to work closely with the local government, whether it's state or provincial to make sure that you acquire the land justly, to make sure there is buy-in. You could, for example, offer the state or the national government an equity stake in the charter city to align interests of the government with the charter city itself. Second, you probably want to involve business and community leaders in the charter city. Successful institutional change requires the allegiance of the ruling elite, so making sure that there is an incentive for those people who are particularly influential in the country to align with the success of the charter city is important. Third, you probably want to attract industries that create a lot of jobs. It is politically difficult to change something if a lot of jobs are being created, if a lot of investment is being had, things like this. So, make it more difficult for the politicians to take action against the charter city by creating a lot of jobs, by making it successful, etc. Third, most countries in the world are signatories to a variety of international treaties. So if you sign a contract with the host country and they expropriate you, depending on how you draft that language, you might be able to go and sue them in the international court, and if you win to confiscate their overseas assets. This is basically a last-ditch solution. If you get to this stage you've already lost. But it might help sort of as a bit of a deterrent against host country trying to confiscate your assets by demonstrating that there is some recourse to that action of expropriation. Another strategy is to list the city on the Stock Exchange. So after 10 or 15 years after the city is successful, maybe you put a listing on the local Stock Exchange for a certain percentage of the value of the developer who has built out the city. What does this mean? Well, this oftentimes, the pension funds and other sorts of financial managers will buy that stock and so pension funds and these financial managers tend to be relatively politically powerful and therefore if their future income streams are depending on the success of the charter city, then the host country might be less likely to take actions against the charter city. And Lastly, I think just to really emphasize the first point - it's very important to make sure charter cities are integrated with the local government, with the community - that the benefits of charter cities are being widespread. The best way, I think, to ensure that there's a minimum of risk of expropriation is just to make sure that it becomes very apparent that the charter city is being successful, it's creating jobs, that everybody is being engaged and participating in the upside of a charter city. TL: The second part question is that… I mean, I'm glad you talked about local governance. In building a charter city, I imagine there are allocative decisions that the government would have to make. I compare Shenzhen to maybe some other initiative like Gurgaon in India and one thing the Chinese government had with Shenzhen is that it still maintained control over the allocation of land. And, at least in my opinion, that allowed some kind of diverse development in terms of the industrial and residential developments that took place, and also in the building of public goods, in the provision of public goods generally. But what you see, at least, I wouldn't call them charter cities, with projects like Eko Atlantic City and others of such is that, yes, they are planned but, maybe for financial reasons, the allocative decisions are made solely for real estate developments. Maybe that helps in recouping some of the investment. So, I guess what I'm asking is, where should the allocative decisions lie to create the proper incentive for a truly income enhancing city to develop?ML: Sure, yeah, and I think that is an important question and looking at Shenzhen versus Gurgaon in India. Gurgaon is quite interesting, for the listeners who don't know, basically because of this sort of historical quirk, there was no government which allowed for no zoning and land use regulations and so a lot of tech companies and sort of large companies went and built offices there, advanced infrastructure there, so it has a lot of office buildings, things like that but because there is no governing structure, the public infrastructure tends to be quite poor. So if I remember correctly, there are basically no sewers, most of the buildings have to run on generators. It allows this freedom to build but it combines that with this lack of government. While Shenzhen, the government has been relatively effective in providing public goods, at creating an open space that allows for its success. And I think if we look at all the planned cities around the world being built today, Eko Atlantic being one example, I think you capture it well in saying that they are real estate, they're not really cities. So, real estate you tend to define everything very carefully, it's 'we build a thousand houses and we sell them each for this much money and this is what the margins are' etc, while a city is evolutionary, it's dynamic. The sort of level of planning of the city government tends to be much smaller. It's not saying we're going to build an apartment building here and we're going to build a commercial district here. It's trying to create the enabling conditions for growth and for success. And what we're trying to do is trying to kind of change the conversation with some of these new city developers to focus on more of an inclusive model where it's aimed at a broader set of residents. Where right now a lot of the new cities are aimed at sort of upper middle income or above, but how can you push the price point down? So one of the projects that we're working on is a document that is tentatively called a draft master plan. What this will do is it will be a master plan for a charter city. We're thinking about having it on 30,000 acres with 1 million residents, but we're explicitly targeting an income level of $1500 annually, which is a little under, I think, the per capita income of Nigeria. It's comparable to the per capita income of Zambia, of Kenya. We're explicitly trying to develop a model where it's accessible to this broad income segment, but we're not saying these are the types of houses that people would already build, we're just kind of thinking about okay, where is the infrastructure going to be? How do we attract an anchor tenant? How do we attract residents? How do we make it dynamic such that people's incomes increase over time? It's possible to build a sort of exclusive gated community where high-income people go and live and work and they end up being quite comfortable there, and I encourage people to do that. That's just not the model that we are particularly interested in. And I think it might be a good business venture but it has limited implications for [the] broader society and what we're interested in is how we can help effect social change to generate economic development and to lift people out of poverty, and I think to do that, it's important to help make sure charter cities are inclusive, allow for all segments of society experience the benefits of living in a fast-growing and dynamic city. TL: A bit of a curveball, so to speak, here. There's a lot of planning involved in charter cities. Do you think that that's a challenge to a free-market model of development?If you look in a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, what's occurring now is called urbanization without industrialization. - MLML: In a way, I mean, I'm sure some market-oriented economist might not like what we are doing. I remember when I was doing my PhD at George Mason I was chatting about this with some people, they were like: well, how do you plan? But if we remember the Keynes versus Hayek rap video, the question is 'who plans for who?' So there always need to be some level of planning, right? We do it on an individual level. We do it on a corporate level, even government does it on some level. If you're just planning for, how many police, how many courts? What should the military do? Things like that. And so we might be taking a slightly more active role in planning than some free markets economists might advocate for in terms of thinking about what the anchor tenant should be, how to attract them, how to create these sort of supply linkages. In the draft master plan that we're developing, we are thinking about basically how to create a type of industrial policy because what we want is, okay, when it starts, maybe you focus on textile manufacturing or some relatively low skilled type of employment, but how do we make sure there is skill transfer over time such that the city can move its way up the value chain, can create more jobs and can have this positive dynamic to help lift people out of poverty rather than just being stuck at textile manufacturing now and then 30 years from now? TL: That's interesting. I spoke with Garett Jones, and one of the things he proposed that developing countries [should] try to do is to become an attractive destination for high skilled labour, you know, a labour quality argument of sorts. Do you think charter cities can be a channel for such attraction of high quality, high skilled labour to developing countries which obviously has benefits?ML: Yeah, I think it can. A charter city if developed correctly will probably be more safe than the host country because the place will be more effective. The charter city will be more dynamic. There will be more opportunities and so if there is a high skilled worker who are in their early career and want to do it abroad. Or maybe their ancestors are from a country and want to sort of return and kind of give back or maybe they are first-generation immigrant and want to give back, then I think a charter city would be a probably more attractive place to live than the rest of the host country because it would be more dynamic. There will be more opportunities. It would be a more exciting place to live. That being said, I think I disagree slightly with Garett Jones on the premise...you definitely want the higher-skilled workers for the knowledge transfer. It depends on exactly what he means by this, but Dubai, for example, was able to attract a lot of high skilled workers primarily from Europe, while Shenzhen developed without that many highly skilled workers. They had a lot of investment from Hong Kong. And they had a lot of managerial talent that could come from Hong Kong. So I think it's quite important to, I guess, create these linkages with different areas, different cities that can help the skills transfer process, and then you probably also want to help high skilled workers come in to fill senior administrative positions. But I think to make sure charter cities are scalable, the vast majority of the new urban residents over the next 30 years are not going to be highly skilled. They're going to be relatively impoverished coming from rural areas. We're not going to have sort of the skills that we typically associate with the modern economy, and I think what is important is to realize that and to create systems and processes to allow them to improve their skills, to allow them to get better, to allow them to, sort of, transform the city into somewhere that they would be proud to call home. TL: I'm curious. What exactly made you, Mark Lutter, interested in this problem? Why did you choose to work on this other than teaching at GMU or writing papers and other things you could have done as an academic?ML: Sure. Well, I'm not sure I could have done that much as an academic. I'm a pretty mediocre academic, I like getting my hands dirty a little bit more. LaughsWhat initially got me interested? I heard a talk where the speaker mentioned Michael [indistinct] and who tried to start a Freeport in Somaliland. And in fact, there is now a Freeport being built in Somaliland by Dubai Ports World in Berbera. And basically, what got me interested was I saw it as an Idea that has massive potential that not that many people were paying attention to and talking about and it got me really excited and so I stayed interested in it and sort of realized that I could have a meaningful contribution to making this, I think, really exciting idea take place. And that's why I've stayed interested in it. I like things that can have a big impact and to me, charter cities are one of the things that might be able to have the biggest impact in the 21st century and so it's quite exciting to be involved. TL: So how important is geography in the development of charter cities? I know proximity to ports is very important to facilitate trade. So, but how does it really feature in your own model?ML: Sure, so geography is obviously quite important because - are you on a trading route? Is there an urbanising population that you can draw from? What are the industries that in the area that you can sort of help supplement? We typically think about locating a charter city has being independent on several factors. You probably want to be within about 2 hours of an urban centre so you can piggyback back off their infrastructure because building an airport or a port is very expensive, but if you are within two hours of them you can acquire a large enough chunk of land to build the city because one of the challenges of building a charter city is actually getting enough land to build the city itself. But if you're 2 hours away, you might be able to acquire enough land but you're still close enough that you can access their airport, that you can kind of access their labour market, that you'll allow for a bit more trade than would take place if you were in the middle of nowhere.Like, you want to be on emerging trade routes. So for example, there's a lot of activities going on in East Africa right now. A lot of people are building ports there. That might be an opportunity for a charter city there. Thinking about how new technology might change sort of migration patterns. Maybe the Hyperloop comes, or maybe supersonic jets come, how does that change human sort of spatial organization? And then can you identify opportunities to locate cities because of that? There might be [an] opportunity for a charter city, for example, in Canada or maybe in Central Asia because Siberia and Northern Canada, with global warming, are going to open up and allow for more agriculture, for more natural resource extraction, things like that. So there will be a demand for people to live there and a new city might allow for it to become sort of a gateway to those respective regions. So basically looking at how human sort of trade and human migration patterns are occurring and then trying to identify those long-term trends and then build in a place that can take advantage of those trends to become a regional hub and provide services to the broader area.TL: The reason I asked that question is this. Someone like Paul Romer I think in his paper with Brandon Fuller would say - you need to build X amount of cities to take the addition we're going to see to the number urban dwellers by the middle of the century. I think their own calculation added about 3 billion additional people living in cities. But someone like Alain Bertaud will say you may not really have that much quality location to do what you want to do, at least, to have the kind of effect that you have in mind. So does geography, giving that land is fixed...does geography limit the potential of [a] charter city in a way? ML: Yeah it could, but this is a question that I think is dependent on data. Alain says that most of the good ports have already been taken. He's probably true (right) about that too a certain extent, because humans being, sort of, social, commerce-oriented mammals will tend to live in areas that are advantageous for that. So a lot of the natural ports already, probably have some degree of human settlement there. And so many of the good locations for cities have probably or even taken, have all of them been taken? Probably not. History is weird and people make decisions based on, sort of, contextual circumstances that might have left some potential city locations just untouched because of this weird set of historical events. So this is something that I'm certainly interested in exploring more. It's a project that I would like to undertake. It's basically hire some people, and identify 50 potential locations for charter cities. Just like lookout where trade is happening, where urbanization is happening, where it is possible to acquire large chunks of land and identify basically 50 of these potential charter city locations to see, okay is the land available? Is it good? How easy is it to acquire? To answer questions like that, if any of your listeners are interested in helping out, with some donations, we can actually start getting this sort of concrete answer to that question.TL: For the audience, I’m going to put up links to the reference guides from the Charter Cities Institute on the website and every other available resource. You wrote an article recently about America's foreign policy and how charter city can play a role in its geopolitical competition with China, specifically the belt and road initiative. Do you care to expatiate on that point?ML: Sure, so I think if we look at, um... the US in some way still has a positive image even with the recent sort of killing/murder of George Floyd. We saw a global outcry of that because I think people rightly hold America to a higher standard versus the outcry that we saw of the sort of Uighur, basically, a genocide in China where people have kind of ignored that because I guess they expected [the] Chinese to do it to a certain extent. But American engagement with the rest of the world has, I think, left a little something to be desired over the last 40 years. Iraq was a disaster, Afghanistan is a disaster, Libya is a disaster, so I think there's a need for rethinking American engagement. Combined with the fact that China is pretty aggressively now pursuing their image on the global stage in terms of building infrastructure with belt and road, in terms of wooing foreign politicians, foreign leaders, to get them to be China's friend. So my article was aimed at… particularly people in the, for example, the Development Finance Corporation in The United States to hopefully get them to see charter cities as a potential way to offer a positive influence on the world. And while specifically, I think what American engagement could look like is having Americans who can help with governance, having Americans who can provide financing options if you use American contractors to help build the city, to help develop governance norms, to basically provide the supporting infrastructure for charter cities which I think are important because right now when developing countries are looking around the world, they think 'okay, what policies do we adopt? Who do we want to be like?' All of them are thinking like let's be like China. China has had tremendous economic growth over the last 40 years. They've lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty which is a great thing. Unfortunately, at the same time that's been coupled with a sort of lack of respect of human rights, with no democracy, with no freedom of speech, these things that are inimical to human flourishing, and they think because America has developed so long ago, the possibility of following a similar pattern to America's development is just outside of people's minds. And so I think what charter cities can hopefully help demonstrate is this sort of we call them American values, but I think they are universal values of things like freedom of toleration of markets really can work for everybody and can provide an alternative development model to the one that China is currently claiming. TL: Sticking with the US, I know you write about it, others write about it, are the institutional (I want to say rot. I don't know maybe that's the right word), you know, are they as bad as some analysts say it is, especially in the light of COVID-19?ML: Yeah, I think it rot is probably an appropriate word. We basically have coasted the last kind of 40 years off of existing institutions. We haven't really been challenged. We haven't updated any of our systems. Everybody is complacent. If you think about it, part of the reason is that nobody has actually helped build an institution in the US. Rather, the most dynamic part of the economy is Silicon Valley because there are people there who are building new things. So people are required, to a certain extent, to have this like very broad set of managerial competencies that you don't need to have if you grow up... and I'm not just saying in government, in government you just develop these very specific set of skills, but also in a lot of large private corporations. How many new national banks have been invested in the last 30, 40 years? And so because of that, you grow up learning a very specific set of competencies which is OK in terms of like keeping the system going, but it means that anytime you're presented with an external shock, you just don't know how to react. And COVID was that shock, which I think exposed a lot of the existing inadequacies in the American system that people were unsure of, like unable to think outside the box. Our bureaucrats were quite skilled at figuring out how to pass the buck, how to not take responsibility for things. But they had no idea how to actually take responsibility and then how to actually enact change that will be beneficial. And we're seeing that continue today, you still can't buy N95 masks on Amazon, it's 3 months after the fact. This is a very solvable problem but our institutions are fundamentally broken and I think you can add that to the growing culture war where you have red states where a lot of people are refusing to wear masks because it's not a pandemic, it's a dempanic, this is a fake disease, really idiotic stuff like that. And then in blue states, you're seeing some of the elite institutions basically begin to eat themselves. The New York Times has basically been taken over by Social Justice Warriors staffers who sort of opposed an op-ed by Tom Cotton, the senator from, I think, Arkansas. And I didn't like that op-ed, it was a bad op-ed but he's a senator for goodness sakes. I mean, if you are the paper of record you should allow senators to publish sometimes even if you don't like their arguments. And so we're seeing this, sort of, I think deeply dysfunctional institutions combined with this deeply dysfunctional culture that will probably take decades or generation to really sort themselves out. There isn't a lot of sort of, I don't know, capacity left at the seams. Even the late 60s, '68 when we saw a similar social unrest, there was something solid. There was a core underneath and I think that core it's quite atrophied. I'm a little bit nervous about the future of the US. TL: And I mean it's interesting to me that you talked about Silicon Valley because, at least, from an outsider's perspective here, it amazes me how little political influence Silicon Valley has. LaughsAnd I have one analogy and I think I tweeted this though I got a lot of pushback here and there that I don't think, and I may be wrong about this... I don't think that the Koch Brothers, for example, would have struggled to build more housing in Silicon Valley. And we have people that are vastly richer than the Koch brothers in the Valley. I mean, what is going on? Why do they have so little political influence? They get railroaded even by the local government. ML: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good question. One of my friends likes to joke that Silicon Valley thinks they're above politics, but in fact, they are below it. You've seen, I think, Apple pledged 2.5 billion dollars to affordable housing in the Bay Area. Microsoft, I think a billion to affordable housing in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, I think, 500 million to affordable housing in the Bay Area. And like the problem is just that, okay, if you're spending half a billion dollars to put it crassly. Like just buy off the entire City Council and just tell them to legalise housing. And I think it's a sort of combination of historical circumstances. One is that because most of Silicon Valley is in the world of bits and not in atoms, they just haven't interacted with the government that much. So because of that, there was no need to really figure out how to work with government, it was like you ignore us, we ignore you. To use this sort of Chinese proverb - the emperor is far away, I'm on the other side of the country, and so they didn't really interact with the government that much, and because of that just saw it as kind of part of the ecosystem, not something that to pay attention to. I believe that is changing now.I think Mark Zuckerberg's congressional hearing like a year ago was a wake-up call where the congressmen were asking Mark Zuckerberg, how do you turn on the iPhone? And it's like, OK, well, when you have the political leaders who are that disconnected with what is actually going on, there is a serious challenge. That being said, it will take a number of years for Silicon Valley to actually figure or politics out. There is, I think, several challenges involved in that. One, I think Silicon Valley has a bias towards nonprofits, they figure if something is a good idea, you should be able to make money off it. But nonprofits are a kind of integral parts of influencing government. Second is Silicon Valley likes things that scale. Government necessarily doesn't really scale. At least it doesn't scale in the same manner that a technology startup does and so because of that you have to put all of these resources in, to help mobilize people, to help create a network, to help influence things and you're unable to tell whether it's actually working for a long period of time. So the technology startup, right, okay, you work for a year, you get product-market fit. After product-market fit, you grow at 10 per cent month over month for a period of like three years or something. So if you're growing 10 per cent month over month, you can see it's working, you can see something is happening. While with politics, you might pay activists on the ground, you might pay lobbyists, but it might take years before you actually see legislation that's even proposed, much less implemented. And most of Silicon Valley just doesn't really operate on those...they're not used to those time horizons and so they're unwilling to sort of put the resources necessary to actually engage them. Now I think a third reason is that Silicon Valley is very, I don't know...it has a very universal mindset. So New York, if you look at New York, all the high net worth people in New York, When they donate to charity, they typically donate to New York charities. So they donate to the Met, they donate to Central Park. They get status by paying for things in New York City, so you have all of these goods supported by basically the billionaire class in New York. In San Francisco, people get status by doing universal things. So the effect of altruist movement, for example, is quite popular in San Francisco. But these universal things, while I think they have a great impact on humanity because you don't get status by helping to improve housing in the city, there just isn't as much focus on the city itself, it's a little bit neglected and so there hasn't been this (the) same mobilization of Silicon Valley elite to coordinate to help fix the city as with New York where the elite do spend a lot more money on improving the city's quality of life. TL: That's interesting. I hope they wake up and they get it right.ML: Me too.TL: Final question, Mark. Ten years from now, if you're looking back at all these things you're working on, particularly charter cities, what do you hope to have achieved? ML: Yeah, in ten years I figure we probably [indistinct words] three dozens or so charter cities that are either up and running or are like in advanced planning stages. In ten years, probably a few million people living in charter cities and with the potential population to reach 10s of millions. I want charter cities to be sort of understood and discussed at every world forum, like the World Economic Forum. All these, like, sort of highfalutin events. I want them to be part of the language, like right now, for example, if we think about International Development there are some themes that come up all the time. I think gender equality and global warming kind of pervade every discussion, as well as randomized control trials, they all pervade every discussion about development, I want to charter cities to help pervade those discussions and not just pervade those discussions but actually be improving people's lives on the ground. TL. Yeah. That's a goal I can get behind. Thank you very much, Mark, and I wish you all the best. ML: Thank you for having me. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

This week Oliver interviews Laura Fox, Lyft's General Manager for Citi Bike in New York. Laura has an incredible background with stints in Qatar, working on Mexico cities planning regulations, time at Sidewalk Labs, and as editor for one of the best books on urban planning and economics we’ve found, Order by Design by Alain Bertaud, all of which is discussed, before digging in to the nitty gritty details of Citibike in NYC.This was a great episode - Laura is an amazing thinker and you’ll get a lot out of listening to her.Specifically we dig into:- an explanation of the Citibike setup - its coverage, size (15k bikes!!), characteristics and relationship to the NYC DOT.- How and why they price as the product as affordabiy as they do.- a discussion about the docked system and the benefits/challenges of this vs the more common dockless system ie. bike valets, load balancing with large numbers locked up and how they create ’capacity valves’.- the impact of electrification on the fleet - how the early data from bikes show both 2-3x utilisation, but also longer duration and distance trip durations.- A wider discussion about micromobility and its intersection with urban form, infrastructure and other planning requirements- How they think about discussions over kerbside allocation, the challenges of of competing with car parking and the data/storytelling needed to counter this.- where Laura sees the future going with regards to MaaS, how she think about Lyft's play in that space and who has the power to be the forcing function to promote widespread adoption.- How COVID-19 has impacted their operations, and the changes in ridership demographics and usage that they’re seeing.The book that we mention is called Order without Design, and can be found on Amazon here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BSYX83S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1]. Would also encourage you to check out Devon Zuegel’s great podcast with Alain and his wife Marie-Agnes about their lives as nomadic urban planners/economists here [https://devonzuegel.com/tag/order-without-design-podcast].

Indian decision makers often blindly copy public policy from abroad, without considering whether it would work in local conditions. Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok join Amit Varma in episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen to explain the damage caused by such 'isomorphic mimicry,' and why it happens in the first place. Also check out: 1. Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State -- Shruti Rajagopalan & Alexander Tabarrok. 2. Modern Principles of Macroeconomics -- Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok. 3. Modern Principles of Microeconomics --  Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok. 4. DeMon, Morality and the Predatory Indian State -- Episode 85 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 5. The Delhi Smog -- Episode 44 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 6. Is India a Flailing State? -- Lant Pritchett. 7. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma. 8. Political Ideology in India -- Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 9. Ideology and Identity -- Pradeep Chhibber & Rahul Verma. 10. Understanding Gandhi. Part One: Mohandas -- Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 11. Understanding Gandhi. Part Two: Mahatma --  Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 12. Akhil Katyal's poem on caste. 13. Caste in Modern India -- Episode 52 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 14. Women at Work -- Episode 132 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Namita Bhandare). 15. Metrics of Empowerment -- Episode 88 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta & Hamsini Hariharan). 16. Here’s What’s Wrong With the Maternity Benefits Act -- Suman Joshi. 17. FSI in India -- Episode 11 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 18. Twelve Dream Reforms -- Episode 138 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan, Rajeswari Sengupta & Vivek Kaul). 19. Slums in India -- Episode 21 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pavan Srinath).  20. Order Without Design -- Alain Bertaud. 21. The Power Broker — Robert Caro. 22. The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs. 23. The Right to Property -- Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 24. Swachh Bharat -- Episode 82 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 25. Modi's Lost Opportunity -- Episode 119 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Salman Soz). 26. Education in India -- Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 27. The Art and Science of Economic Policy -- Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 28. In Service of the Republic -- Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 29. The Importance of Cities -- Episode 108 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Reuben Abraham & Pritika Hingorani).

Horace and Oliver have a great discussion on the philosophical underpinnings of price signals going back to Freidrich Hayek and how price works to coordinate activity in society. They discuss how micromobility suffers from market manipulation for its infrastructure and manufacturing and how road space allocation is currently misaligned to how it’s valued as real estate. It’s Horace at his best - philosophical, paring theory to reality, and giving us all new frameworks to think about how the world works and will change. Specifically, they dig into: - The concept of using price signals to allocate resources in society proposed by Freidrich Hayek, where that came from as a concept, where it has been applied (free market vs. centrally planned economies), and why it’s interesting in the context of oil prices. - Why black/grey markets exist everywhere - Where it has and hasn’t used for road space allocation, and why that matters - What the impact on micromobility would be if road space could be more effectively priced. - Why minimum car parking is an unpriced externality, and how it came to be. - The geostrategic investment in the auto sector coming out of WW2, and why that has had an impact on city infrastructure - Sunk cost fallacies and the choice of what we continue to invest in in society. - Why clear price signals for real estate used for infrastructure would accelerate the adoption of micromobility. - A discussion about the use of economics in urban planning, including a short discussion of the excellent book Order without Design by Alain Bertaud. Thanks also to our sponsor for the episode, Populus.ai. Populus are building digital tools that assist government agencies to manage their curbs, streets and sidewalks with access to intelligent data and analytics tools. Last week, they announced their Open Streets Initiative to provide cities with digital solutions to identify and communicate slow and safe street policies. Oakland, California recently announced that 74 miles of streets would be closed to through vehicle traffic in order to make it safer for pedestrians, and small sustainable modes to travel for essential trips and create more room for social distancing. Populus works with cities around the world, from Buenos Aires to Baltimore - to help build trust between operators and regulators to see shared mobility become the big success that we think it can be. They run webinars and produce some of the best editorial content about the impact of micromobility on cities in the US that we’ve seen - if you’re looking to educate yourself better on the space, and/or are looking for tools to build trust with your local government to help take shared micromobility to the next level, check them out.

For today's episode, we discuss urban planning with Alain Bertaud, senior research scholar at NYU's Marron Institute and the author of Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Our conversation covers many subtopics under the central theme of the processes that allow cities to come into being and be maintained. Cities – healthy ones at least – are in essence the products of spontaneity, compositions of ever-changing movements dictated by the connections between the people who live in them, and we consider how planning can accommodate this reality. One of Alain's central hypotheses is that labor markets are the foundation of cities and the idea that good transport and service-based approaches to planning will produce healthier labor markets. This idea penetrates much of the conversation with Alain today and we hear his thoughts on topics like which cities had labor markets and which didn't, why some cities die and others keep surviving, why some shape history and others don't, the best ancient cities, and how one might approach the construction of a master-planned city. We consider two models that mayors could follow, that of the janitor and that of the CEO, with one focusing on service and the other, a grand vision. We consider which of these two models best serve cities concerning their fundamentally spontaneous nature. Alain also weighs in on the idea of negative property rights, Haussmannian and Schumpeterian approaches to planning, and the future of transportation in relation to a city's ability to develop organically. We wrap our conversation up with a focus on charter cities, looking at how to fill up a space that is not a destination in and of itself yet. Catch our conversation today for wide-ranging and incisive observations on the nature of cities with our wonderful guest. Key Points From This Episode: •   A definition of labor markets as places of freedom to select your job or employee. •   The idea that labor markets are the foundation of cities. •   Examples of cities not based on labor markets where workers had no choice regarding work. •   A planning error: placing housing next to jobs, thus threatening the labor market. •   US and Chinese cluster cities/fragmented labor markets; integrating them using transport. •   The limits of the bus/drive/subway system to cope with urban sprawl. •   Getting past oversimplified understandings of cities having one industry like tech or finance. •   A conception of a mayor's job as being to enable rather than direct a city's labor market. •   How land use is not recycled in non-labor market cities in China and the Soviet Union. •   New transport models like Uber and Hyperloop, which have the power to change future cities. •   Whether coronavirus' high toll on dense places will stop them from existing in the future. •   A consumer's right to make tradeoffs between commute time and floor space area. •   The best ancient cities and Alain's belief that different cities are preferable to different people. •   Important contributions Haussmann made to Paris' navigability, notwithstanding his motives. •   Freedom, exchange, commerce, and why some cities produce a higher cultural output. •   An argument for having large municipalities for coordinating efforts more effectively. •   Paralysis caused by a dilution of property rights and elevation of negative property rights. •   Pros and cons of China's good technicians operating within a command economy. •   Why informal economies exist and how some have been absorbed by formal ones. •   Reasons why some cities collapse: bad management, changing trade routes, and more. •   Alain's book's Support this podcast

Do we really want our mayors to have a vision? This is the provocative question asked by Alain Bertaud in an article on The MIT Press Reader. Bertaud is a Senior Research Scholar at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, an urban planner, and the author of the 2018 book Order without Design. In his article, Bertaud writes that a mayor “convinced of the necessity of having a vision” is less inclined to support innovation welling up from the population and more inclined to impose his or her own vision.  A mayor with a vision needs to be followed, not questioned by people who lack one. Visionary leadership implies a top-down approach, in other words, but a city is mostly created from the bottom up. Bertaud’s alternative? Mayors and their municipal staff, including urban planners and economists, should be considered not visionaries or rulers, then, but a well-coordinated team (one hopes) of competent managers and janitors. Bertaud’s article is the subject of this week’s Upzoned. In this episode, host Abby Kinney, an urban planner with Gould Evans in Kansas City, is joined by Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges. They discuss visionary mayors, the role of city managers in creating good feedback loops, and how local governments can act as support systems for local innovation rather than gatekeepers. Then in the Downzoned, Abby recommends a podcast that’s taking a hard look at the lucrative wellness industry. And Daniel recommends a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about North Vietnamese spy living in Los Angeles after the Fall of Saigon.  Show Notes Do We Really Want Our Mayors to Have a Vision?, by Alain Bertaud Order without Design, by Alain Bertaud Dongo Chang (Twitter) The Dream Podcast The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen Daniel Herriges (Twitter) Abby Kinney (Twitter) Gould Evans Studio for City Design Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom (Soundcloud) Select Strong Towns articles on local government Let's Make Public Hearings More Public, by Travis Parker Learn from Peers but Think for Yourself, by Charles Marohn Prototyping the City (podcast) Beyond the Buzzword: Innovation and How it Can Help Local Government Create Meaningful Change (podcast)

On this episode, Alain Bertaud explores what makes for a well-managed city, and he asserts that a respect for market forces is critical when shaping urban policy. The post https://www.aei.org/multimedia/alain-bertaud-how-markets-shape-cities/ (Alain Bertaud: How markets shape cities) appeared first on https://www.aei.org (American Enterprise Institute - AEI).

America’s ten largest metro areas combine for 34 percent of total GDP, and some 80 percent of the nation’s 5,000 fastest-growing businesses are located in large urban areas. Simply put, cities are critical to driving growth and innovation. Yet cities also offer unique policy challenges. They require energetic local government, but too often such energies […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/political-economy-james-pethokoukis/alain-bertaud-how-markets-shape-cities/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Political Economy with James Pethokoukis in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

Alex Aragona chats with Alain Bertaud as he shares his thoughts on how cities truly flourish and how urban planners should approach their role. 

Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in their designs, resulting in city development that too often fails to address the needs of their residents. Following the release of his recent book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, Alain joined Tyler in New York City for a discussion of the politics affecting urban centers, his advice to Robert Moses, whether the YIMBY movement can win, why he loves messy cities, what he got wrong about Shenzhen, why the Moscow subway is so wonderful, whether cities can move, favorite movies about cities, the region of the world most likely to start a charter city, how to reform the World Bank, his top three NYC planning reforms, why Central Park is the perfect size, and more. Transcript and links Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email

Today's guest is Alain Bertaud, author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Alain discusses his extensive experience in urban planning: When he was first trained as a planner, urban planning was thought of as an offshoot of architecture. In this conception, cities are just large buildings that need to be laid out and designed by a skilled architect. Through his experience, Alain came around to thinking of cities not as large buildings to be designed, but as markets. He argues that planners are too focused on what happens on private property and not focused enough on what happens on public streets and roadways. He argues that urban economics has many useful insights for urban planners and that economists should be integrated into urban planning teams. The publisher's description of the book follows: Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners' dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teaches philosophy at New York University. This, along with a family scattered across half-a-dozen countries, establishes him as a true cosmopolitan, a label Appiah readily accepts. Yet he insists it is nonetheless possible to be a cosmopolitan patriot, rooted in a place, while having obligations and interests that transcend one’s national identity. He joins Tyler to discuss this worldly perspective and more, including whether Africa will secularize, Ghanian fallibilism, teaching Jodie Foster, whether museums should repatriate collections, Karl Popper, Lee Kuan Yew, which country has the best jollof rice, the value of writing an ethical advice column, E.T. Mensah, Paul Simon, the experience of reading 173 novels to judge the Man Booker prize, and what he’s learned farming sheep in New Jersey. We're coming to New York City! Join us for a live podcast recording with Alain Bertaud on September 9th. To learn more and register for the event, click here. Transcript and links Follow Kwame on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email

Urbanist and author Alain Bertaud of NYU talks about his book Order Without Design with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Bertaud explores the role of zoning and planning alongside the emergent factors that affect the growth of cities. He emphasizes the importance of cities as places for people to work and looks at how preferences and choices shape cities. Bertaud also reflects upon the differing perspectives of urban planners and economists.

Urbanist and author Alain Bertaud of NYU talks about his book Order Without Design with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Bertaud explores the role of zoning and planning alongside the emergent factors that affect the growth of cities. He emphasizes the importance of cities as places for people to work and looks at how preferences and choices shape cities. Bertaud also reflects upon the differing perspectives of urban planners and economists.

Brussels Design September 2018 is more than 100 cultural and commercial design events across the city. There will be exhibitions, conferences, an Arts & Crafts itinerary, the Commerce Design Awards and the Brussels Design Market (BDM) - in all, many, many places for interaction between designers, architects and the public in stores and pop-up stores, galleries and cultural spaces. We hear from Roel Rijselbeek, director of Design September, Julie Savie of BDM, Julie Bonnichaux of Up Brussels, designer Charlotte Lancelot, and Architect and designer Alain Bertaud. http://www.designseptember.be/

City governments tend to provide necessary infrastructure like roads, sewers, and electricity grids. They also enact regulations and other policies designed to affect the quality and density of buildings. But what's the ideal balance between government planning and de-centralized decision making when it comes to affordable housing? What can cities that rely less on planning teach us about the right role for government in improving housing affordability and development overall? Alain Bertaud of NYU joins us on this episode to discuss how solutions to creating more affordable housing can arise spontaneously and independent of top-down design.