Order without Design is a book about urban planning written by a research scholar and published by MIT Press. You will not be surprised to learn that its prose and organization are academic.
I am fascinated by the way organization emerges from the interaction of simple principles, and that is what Order without Design is about. If you think of a city as "primarily a labor market" whose success depends on the proximity of jobs and homes and on the ease of transportation between them, you can understand how cities end up organized the way they are. You can also see what determines land prices, housing costs, and usage of various forms of transportation.
Bertaud's stated purpose is to encourage collaboration between urban planners, who make normative policy recommendations, and urban economists, who analyze descriptive data about day-to-day operations. His more fundamental purpose, though, is to argue for a libertarian approach to land use regulation and transportation planning. The libertarian bent becomes pronounced in the last couple of chapters.
Viewing cities as simply labor markets works well as a way to focus the discussion in the early chapters. In the later chapters, however, it becomes clear that mayors and city planners have many more goals to take into account and that those other goals justify some of the practices that Bertaud rejects as hubris or counterproductive. For example, he objects to regulations that raise land prices and reduce affordability, but many of them are in place for reasons beyond the purely economic. He acknowledges the success of regulations in Paris designed to retain its historical character, but considers it an anomaly. He considers some slums in Indonesia as a success story because of their market-sensitive use of land.
I am fascinated by the way organization emerges from the interaction of simple principles, and that is what Order without Design is about. If you think of a city as "primarily a labor market" whose success depends on the proximity of jobs and homes and on the ease of transportation between them, you can understand how cities end up organized the way they are. You can also see what determines land prices, housing costs, and usage of various forms of transportation.
Bertaud's stated purpose is to encourage collaboration between urban planners, who make normative policy recommendations, and urban economists, who analyze descriptive data about day-to-day operations. His more fundamental purpose, though, is to argue for a libertarian approach to land use regulation and transportation planning. The libertarian bent becomes pronounced in the last couple of chapters.
Viewing cities as simply labor markets works well as a way to focus the discussion in the early chapters. In the later chapters, however, it becomes clear that mayors and city planners have many more goals to take into account and that those other goals justify some of the practices that Bertaud rejects as hubris or counterproductive. For example, he objects to regulations that raise land prices and reduce affordability, but many of them are in place for reasons beyond the purely economic. He acknowledges the success of regulations in Paris designed to retain its historical character, but considers it an anomaly. He considers some slums in Indonesia as a success story because of their market-sensitive use of land.
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