Last summer I ran into Alain Bertaud in Charleston (above). We had first met in India, when he was at the World Bank and I was at McGill Uiversity, working on a research project with B.V. Doshi’s Vastu Shilpa Foundation. I had not seen Alain in the intervening forty years yet our conversation effortlessly picked up where it left off. We were both architects who had been drawn to urbanism, which is not that unusual, but we also shared the rarer experience of being exposed to urban economists, and learning to see city planning through their eyes. Alain describes his experience in Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (MIT Press, 2018). This book is based on the simple thesis that “cities are primarily labor markets,” and in that sense it is as mighty a critique of city planning as Jane Jacobs’s Life and Death of Great American Cities was fifty-five years ago. Like Jacobs, Bertaud observes rather than theorizes, except that he casts his eye far and wide, on cities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Bertaud brings more than five decades of experience to the task. Ed Glaeser has called him “one of the world’s great urbanists.” No exaggeration.
