In recent decades, urban planners have been inventing all sorts of abstract objectives to justify their plans for our future cities: smart growth, liveability, and sustainability are among the most recent fads.

There is nothing wrong, of course, for a city to be smart, liveable, or sustainable. 

But for some reason these vague and benign sounding objectives often become a proxy for imposing planning regulations that severely limit the supply of land, resulting in ever higher housing prices. They also reduce the ability of cities to cope with their residents’ transport needs.

New York University senior scholar Alain Bertaud, himself a former principal urban planner at the World Bank, argues that it is time for planners to think again. They need to abandon abstract objectives and focus their efforts on just two measurable outcomes: citizens’ mobility and housing affordability.

Join us for a thought-provoking challenge of current urban planning orthodoxies.
 

Alain Bertaud is an urbanist and, since 2012, a senior research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanisation Project. Currently, he is writing a book about urban planning that is tentatively titled Order Without Design. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port au Prince (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).

Bertaud’s research, conducted in collaboration with his wife Marie-Agnès, aims to bridge the gap between operational urban planning and urban economics. Their work focuses primarily on the interaction between urban forms, real estate markets and regulations.