Order without Design
by Alain Bertaud · first published 2018
60% recommend30% neutral10% critical
Why HN recommends it
Economics-grounded account of how markets and geographic constraints shape cities, linking urban planning ideas to economic principles. Especially relevant for those working on land use and housing.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"This book emerges from a 55-year career in urban planning, and is illustrated by the author's real-world experience. Without understanding how markets work, urban planners are likely to design infrastructure and regulations that will adversely impact the functioning of cities. By contrast, urban economists review decisions and outcomes after the fact, often publishing their conclusions in specialized journals that fail to influence decision making. This book is a call for qualitative urban planners and quantitative urban economists to come together. Specifically, the book calls for urban econ
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One of the most eye opening books on this topic was "Order without Design" by Alain Bertaud. Essentially, cities exist entirely as job markets - where individuals make tradeoffs to handle geographic constraints. It will be interesting to see if the WFH shift changes this…
on “Americans need to be richer than ever to buy their first home” ↗Huzzah! Another aficionado of land use issues! Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly. Towards the end of the book he talks about the indonesian Kampung, briefly touched upon in this interview…
on “Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?” ↗Working my way through Alain Bertaud's Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities[1] at the moment and it's proving to be a really great resource for understanding this kind of thing and in the process marrying together a bunch of urban planning concepts and…
on “Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work” ↗Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects -> On Urbanism: Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures) Metamuse interview on cities [2] and a lot more on her blog On tech : She was the PM for Github sponsors…
on “Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing” ↗…parts of older cities that we now love were build in the first place. Individuals build their buildings on fairly small lots, we didn't have developers build entire neighborhoods. I recommend the book Order Without Design and/or its corresponding podcast for great insights: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/order-without-design
on “Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed with Building Utopian Cities” ↗…we are thinking wrong about cities. Cities aren't like massive buildings, but more like organisms. Three best results are achieved if we allow them to grow somewhat organically. I recommend the book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities or the short podcast of the same name.
on “Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming” ↗…everywhere, but it isn’t a good strategy. It certainly isn’t organic Agreed. The planning and homogenous construction that gets often pushed for is a problem. This in part can be addressed by smaller parcels. Order Without Design, book and podcast, go into this and how some cities solved it. Somehow real estate and housing tempts everyone to throw out all the lessons we learned from communism about the perils of central planning.
on “Why Neighborhoods and Small Businesses Thrive in Tokyo” ↗‘Order without Design’ is one of my favorite books on the topic.
on “Americans need to be richer than ever to buy their first home” ↗A question about prefab construction came up at a talk this year in Sydney with Lucy Turnbull (Former Sydney Mayor) and Alain Bertaud (planner and author order without design), Lucy mentioned someone tried this in Sydney and went under and they never heard from them again despite promising the world. Alain mentioned that tastes (think in terms of from finishes to floor plans)…
on “Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?” ↗Alain Bertaud addresses cities as labor markets in Order Without Design. A talk a bit about it here: https://thinkthinkthink.substack.com/p/the-15-minute-city-th... Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent…
on “Cities are living entities always changing and adapting to new environments” ↗And these small units would be illegal in most modern US cities. Alain Bertaud who wrote Order Without Design described how his family lived in a tiny apartment in NYC when they first moved to the US. The unit would now be illegal and they wouldn't have an option. It's over of the many cases where we don't like…
on “Why Neighborhoods and Small Businesses Thrive in Tokyo” ↗i took a quick look at "Order Without Design" and am not digging what I've read so far. to decide whether something might be worth a read, i usually try to get a quick feel for it from the title, subtitle, author, author's affiliations, the book's…
on “Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?” ↗I do not know from where the quote is but he wrote a book - Order Without Design
on “Should more of us be moving to live near friends?” ↗