Thread by @jensthang

#4 - On Cities, Planning, and Order Without Design 🦸‍♂️

Alain Bertaud, author of 'Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities' chats with @EconTalker on the emergent factors that affect the growth of cities.

Key takeaways from the interview (thread) 👇

overcast.fm/+JD0UwTk

1/ An urban planner thinks in terms of norms; an economist in terms of needs.

2/ If you ask an urban planner, 'What is the optimum size of housing?' this planner will tell you a number. If you ask the same economist will say, 'Well, it all depends.

3/ The tendency of planners is to concentrate on, for instance, the size of the quality of housing, forgetting about location.

4/ When you want to plan for others, you need some information. And usually you think you have this information, but you don't. So you make the wrong decision.

5/ The working of the labor market is a foundation for everything we like in cities, they were made possible because there was a very efficient labor market in the city which produced those monuments.

6/ When the labor market is efficient, then can put to use in all of the things, which makes the city much more pleasant.

7/ The foundation is still this labor market. If people cannot get to their jobs in a relatively short time, the city will, the city economy will fragment in a way, and become less and less efficient.

8/ The labor market is not just to have a job.

9/ A labor market is the ability for an individual to look at different jobs, constantly, and eventually change jobs if you are not satisfied with your current job, or if you find it boring or if you think it's not paying enough.

10/ In looking for a job you make a tradeoff. You make a tradeoff between the time commuting, the salary you will have, the people you will be working with, whether they are pleasant or not.

11/ Tradeoffs will be made very differently by different people and the idea of some planner to try to match housing and employment is a complete illusion. And it doesn't work.

12/ The labor market, the functioning of the labor market, means being able to change jobs as you like it, and not being constrained so much by transport or affordability.

13/ To be employed in itself is not a labor market e.g. in Russia and China before the Reform.

14/ It was not a labor market in the sense that people were employed in the same factory or same enterprise for all their life, whether they like it or not, whether they were competent to do it or not.

15/ Because of this lack of labor market, most people were just mis-employed.

16/ Two households with exactly the same income, having a choice between smaller apartment closer to city center, or a larger house in the suburb. This is the way an efficient city works, has a self-generated mechanism which provides this choice.

17/ I sometimes argue against zoning plans, because zoning will affect the use to a certain area. And it's possible that this is not the best use.

18/ E.g. downtown NY was mostly office buildings for a long time. After 911 incident, many firms left Wall Street. Suddenly people discovered there are a lot of demand for people living in the Wall Street area.

19/ They changed the zoning plans, and now half of Wall Street area are residential condominimums.

20/ A city's productivity depends on its ability to maintain mobility as its built up area grows.

21/ One of the first job of the planner as the city expands, is to separate what is private (what developers can build) and public (streets, parks, river).

22/ If they do not do that then they do not develop those right of ways for future transport.

23/ Cities like Jakarta and Bangkok, the planners thought that they would be kind of garden cities and not really expand. So it was not designed to expand, and resulted in terrible jams because there was not enough space.

24/ It's important is to estimate in advance the right of way for a city to develop.

25/ Cities have to devise a new system of transport, which will probably link individual transport with fast rail to go from one area of the metropolitan area to another for long distance. And, this is what the Chinese are working on right now.

26/ If we understand what the labor market, the large labor market brings to a city, then we have to invent new means of transport.

27/ We have to face a reality that, whichever country develop, integrate, labor market of 60 million people, like, or 100 million people like the Chinese now decided to do.

28/ If they succeed in providing transport, to unify this labor market, they will outdo us in terms of productivity in a way that we cannot even conceive it.

29/ Tunneling is a new thing now given the cost of tunneling is going to go down with new technology. And that will in a way make a city much more viable.

30/ One thing in NYC that should have been done is to put all the cars which are parked in the street in a privately owned parking underground, so they should pay market price for parking.

31/ The streets in New York, especially in Manhattan, should be entirely devoted to either pedestrian or taxi or Uber.

32/ People who will park their car the entire year in the street is a complete waste of space.

33/ In Manhattan, 40% of buildings could not be built today, not because of building code or fire safety, but because there are too many apartments in those buildings.

34/ The 2 main jobs of urban planner is affordability and mobility. Forget about livability, resiliency etc.

35/ Infrastructure has not followed the expansion of cities because of the idea that cities should not grow so much.

36/ If we are aware of how markets work, it's not possible to build houses which is affordable to a school teacher in NY or SF.

37/ Transport technology is a big revolution in urban transport, it will be equivalent to go from horse to motorized transport. Self-driving cars, ride-sharing, and with all these new technology, it's a rather optimistic future.