Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities abstracts cities to what Alain Bertaud claims is their fundamental purpose: a market for labor. Using this abstraction, the book explores land use, transportation, jobs, housing, and more in the context of markets. In this analysis, Bertaud draws on his years of experience as a city planner across the world to vividly describe the various forces that built everything from informal slums in Mumbai—the inevitable result, he argues, of regulations that prohibit cheap formal housing—to the corporate-owned plazas that anchor New York City skyscrapers to the surrounding sidewalk—these ones are the result of a scheme by the city to extract public works projects from developers by way of exemptions from floor-to-land-area ratio (FAR) restrictions. These examples come together to form an interesting and insightful, though not totally convincing, case for the eradication of large-scale “urban design”, instead deferring to the free market to make decisions about urban form wherever possible.
Order Without Design was easy to follow—headings helpfully tell you the takeaway from each section of the mega-chapters—and includes several extremely good figures. Abstracting the city as he does allows Bertaud to present simple but insightful mathematical models for metrics like density, commuting time, and prices. And, though the beginning of the book made me worried that he would try to argue for a completely free market, Bertaud acknowledges that the market cannot possibly solve some of society’s needs and suggests well-considered proposals for regulation and subsidy where necessary. At the end of the book, Order without Design suggests several ways that he believes the urban planning profession could improve its effectiveness (for instance, a core proposal was that planning should be centered more around real-time numeric metrics and less around long-term master plans). I found these quite convincing.
Where the argument doesn’t quite connect for me is in the discussion of transportation. While Bertaud makes a convincing argument for the importance of a good transport system in a successful city and performs quite a lot of interesting calculation of things like road consumption per vehicle, Bertaud’s analysis of the topic focuses only on transportation as a means of enabling the growth of the labor market in an already-existing city. This demand-driven approach is consistent with other arguments throughout the book (for instance, he advocates for housing subsidy through vouchers for market-rate housing rather than through supply-side subsidies to developers who build affordable housing), but transportation is fundamentally different from even illiquid things like housing due to the very long construction process and extreme difficulty of acquiring adequate land. Indeed, Bertaud admits that no market solution has been able to build an effective transportation system: instead, he claims in chapter 3, it is one of the government’s core functions to provide an adequate transportation system.
This is where the argument broke down for me. After a diatribe against out-of-touch designers who force their outlandish utopian ideas on cities in the first half of the book, Bertaud seems to concede that design is, after all, necessary for transportation. And beyond that concession, he begins to design it himself! At the end of chapter 5, he outlines a rail-plus-shared-motor-tricycle plan that he thinks might be ideal. In his analysis and following design, Bertaud does not bring up that the very shape of the city—indeed, the land prices that he holds so sacred—will critically depend on the design that the government chooses for the transporation system. A train line will generate highly-priced land clustered around stations, while a broad network of large, widely-spaced arterials will likely generate a more even distribution of land prices. If nonmotorized transit is made to be safe, it will be a much larger part of the transportation system than if it requires the feeling of risking one’s life. If we need to design transportation anyways, and transportation is the foundation on which the rest of the city is built, how do we know that our transporation choices even make it possible for the market to converge on the best possible city?
I also found that Order Without Design’s discussion of externalities left me wanting quite a bit more. Though externalities are one of the compelling arguments against market solutions, Bertaud hardly mentioned the existence of costs that are not included in the price of things like transportation, infrastructure, and housing until the middle of the transportation chapter. When he finally did so (I was beginning to panic that he was going to pretend that they didn’t exist at all), he presented some well-reasoned solutions—in particular, he made a compelling and exciting case that recent technological advances will soon allow us to price both carbon emissions and road use based on actual consumption—but completely ignored, among others, the huge risk of collisions that is perhaps the most immediate externality of personal vehicle transporation. It’s clear throughout the book that Bertaud thinks modern “urbanism”—which often focuses on improving the comfort and practicality of walking and biking in cities—is based on emotion rather than on numbers and is, in sum, silly. But because he left out critical considerations like cars’ huge death toll and the perceived increase in happiness from the ability to walk to the grocery store or to restaurants that make modern urbanism’s ideas so compelling, I felt thoroughly unconvinced that the market solution was actually the right one.
At the end of the book, Bertaud discusses the difficulty in identifying a “utility function” for cities in general. Though he spent the vast majority of the book using labor-market-based utility functions like “jobs accessible in an hour’s commute”, he acknowledges that for a city like Paris, those functions don’t match the desired goal at all: instead, Paris tries to maintain an urban form consistent with its history. And while I certainly found Bertaud’s focus on optimizing cities as labor markets both insightful and very interesting, I’m not sure I believe that most residents’ personal utility functions are maximized when labor market efficiency is maximized. To me, this variance and the huge range of interests is part of what makes cities so hard to generalize and so interesting to study.
Ultimately, Order without Design did not thoroughly convince me of its core argument and felt like it lacked some of the nuance that makes politics so difficult. But it was packed with extremely interesting (to me, inspirational) quantitative analyses, outlines and supports many concrete proposals to improve our cities, and made really made me think. So it has earned a spot on my future bookshelf, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that is interested in urban design and transportation.