Speaker: Alain Bertaud, Senior Fellow, New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. Moderator: Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard's Graduate School of Design. The discussion revolves around Alain's recent book, "Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities," where he argues operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure.
Diane Davis Hello everybody, and welcome to Dev Talks. I'm Diane Davis and I'm the Charles Dyer Norton, Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at the Graduate School of Design. That ugly, brutalist building. We're not going to talk about that design today over near Sanders Theater. I'm also a faculty at the GSD I’m a faculty in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. And I work extensively on relations between urbanization and development in Latin America and other Global South contexts. So I’m really excited to be here and I know Alain’s work but thank you all for inviting me to moderate this session. It's my great honor to welcome Alain Bertaud for a session that will largely revolve around his book, which I brought if you haven't seen it yet, "Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities." I should also say, in the interest of full disclosure, I sent Alain some of the questions, but there's some surprise questions. Let's see if he's flustered at all by any of them, I doubt it. So we'll start with a few of them that he's already gotten, you know, just to get us moving in the conversation today. So the first one, and I'm going to dive in and start really simply asking him what motivated you to write this book? It seems that with all your experience, we might have seen a book like this from you even earlier than 2018. So is it owing to your own personal trajectory, or shall I say, the state of the world? That is, would you think there's an urgent need to align planners and urban economists today, perhaps because of certain challenges or recent developments in the world?
Alain Bertaud Well, first, thanks for inviting me here. We're very happy to have an audience Why did I write this book and why so late in my career? It's kind of a swan song in a certain way for me because I was busy doing things. And so I had this book of over 20 years, actually, I had notes, but I never had time to finish it. And it was ten years ago, 11 years, ten years ago, now that he convinced me that I wanted this note to be a little chapter that I would put on the web, like, I put some of my output. And he convinced me that if I wanted to have an impact, that I have to publish a book, you know, a paper book through regular publisher. And I thought that it would take too much time for me or. He always stimulated me to do that. And they organized every two weeks at NYU, a kind of informal group that you will assemble about ten or 12 people to discuss chapters of my book one by one. And that was really extremely stimulating. And so I finished my book then in five, let's say five years, when I was at NYU, under this again, intellectual stimulant. Which again, the idea of my book is that it's people you meet in cities which are important. It was not the building of NYU or the sewer system or sub city.
Diane Davis We'll come back to New York City in a while. But so my second question is the idea at the heart of the book and feel free to correct me if my reading of the book is not exactly what you're reading as the book is, but the idea at the heart of the book is that planners and urban economists need to work together, but they frequently, if not all the time, do not, although we do have urban economists over in the GSD , so in the in their planning program. So you identify a series of explanations for this. For example, you argue that while planners are driven by normative values and qualitative understandings of cities, urban economists rely more on quantitative methods, empirical reasoning and science. Can you summarize your argument for the audience here? And perhaps frame it and this is where I'm going to add you to embellish a bit. Frame it in terms of the fact that planners may see themselves as having different clients, if you will, such as working for citizens or even the state. While economists may be trying to assure that market dynamics are working efficiently and thus have an ephemeral client of sorts without the direct relationship or accountability, so and might that the fact that they might have different clients have a bearing on how and for what reason, they would not work well together?
Alain Bertaud I don't I don't think it's a difference of clients. I think that planners usually have a background either like me as architect. By the way, you introduced me as an economist. I run economists on my own, you know, and some my colleagues at the World Bank call me a fair economist. But, you know, so I learn on the on the spot. So economists try to understand how things work. Planners, architect, or people who are involved in cities would like to invent something new. They think that they are dissatisfied with cities and we are hard. They are always something which doesn't go well and they think, well, if we rearrange cities this way, everything will be fine. They are not so much interested in how the city works right now. They are just interested in something better that you know, in a certain way, sometimes they think they compare themselves. You know, they see, for instance, an iPhone, which is a wonderful object, and they say we could design a city the way an iPhone, a smart phone is designed. And of course, they forget that every two or three years we throw away our iPhone and we buy another one, which is completely different. And the function of an iPhone also is relatively clear. Where a city, again, I get back to my original idea, is made of the people who are there. And those people have priorities and are making tradeoffs which are unpredictable, which are very different. An average doesn't give you anything. So it's only by observing the way people act and will act in the future, which is unpredictable to this spontaneous order that you can develop in infrastructure which allows the city to work. I don't think that it's so much the idea of the clientele. Now, my criticism of economists is that they tend to speak to each other. They use the jargon, which is useful. I think when you talk about professional jargon is useful because it's a shortcut. You know, it's faster to use, but that means that you don't reach many, you know, you don't reach a mayor with jargon or it is for council. So and they tend to because they are very quantitative, they will shy away of the problems which do not have a database which is built up. So for instance, let's say if they want to discuss rent control, they will be delighted to take cases where input has been applied and very cleverly compared, you know, other area which had no control and come with a very convincing paper. But if a mayor or city council say, why don't we establish rent control in this city and they start discussing it, economists will not participate in general, unfortunately. So what I would like them is to participate at the moment where rent control is being discussed, not after it has been implemented.
Diane Davis I want to deviate already from my questions because you've got such great answers. Let me just make a comment and I won't belabor it, but I've been teaching the kind of history and theory of urban planning over at the GSD, some of my students are here, and we've just had a long discussion in the last couple of weeks, again I mentioned I'm trained as a sociologist, about the Chicago School of Sociology and the influence of that on the kind of profession of urban planning. The interest in communities in and out of the Chicago school comes both quantitative census data that kind of reframes and creates the basis for theory, and then that gets reified. So in other words, there's an interest in community, but the interest in the quantitative documentation of that prevents often economists from getting down to the dynamism of communities and how people live in them. So I'm thinking very much that you're really calling out - oh, and also in the Chicago school, they're more kind of data analytics type, are our thinking about the city like an organism, like a machine, where you need data to understand how it's working or not working. So I see your work is really engaging in these age old debates that have plagued our field and that plague all of us who study cities. At what point is data helpful or what point to search for data gets in the way of solving contemporary problems?
Alain Bertaud I think data is absolutely necessary and more than useful. But let's say what I would push economists is to look at existing data where we can collect data, especially now with the technology there. There's a lot of data actually which are out there which will explain to us how a city works and we don't quite know how to use this data yet. And so I think that we should look forward monitoring what is happening. Understanding of the city work is absolutely essential and we can do that only useful data. But that's different from writing a paper published in a Journal which uses data, let's say, to make your point.
Speaker 1 I mean, that's really important because in cities, just to paraphrase what you've said, new problems emerge that you haven't collected the data on yet. So you can't, like, wait until somebody else does that in order to solve those problems. And that leads to a question, one of my first new questions that I didn't send you, but it's really building on everything you've already said, and it has to do with the temporality of the problems that we're looking at. So I'm like, you know, there are problems we don't have data on. But one could also say in the contemporary era that there is dare I say an obsession, surveillance capitalism is discussed here at the business school a lot, but there is an obsession with data, and all of a sudden there's almost maybe too much data. So there's a balance with not enough data and too much data. In other words, data is coming in all the time. So my question to you having to do with the temporality of the problems, but also of kind of using data. The question is, is the failure of planners and urban economists to work together, a longstanding problem? Or is it something that's new or perhaps more urgent now? Maybe urgent because of the availability or the desire to get more data? If it's a longstanding problem, why is it not been readressed, mediated or resolved yet? And if it's new, why and at what ways are the challenges of urban development different now than in the past? So really thinking about this is you've been working for decades. This has been a problem for a while. But can you say something about the contemporary era and how it might be different?
Alain Bertaud Let's see. When I started my career, data was very difficult to get. You know, there were maps were done, you know, just to know even the extent of the city which was built. Maps were done through surveying land. Surveying was very long in many of the country I worked in. I had maps. I was using maps which were 50 years old. I remember doing Masterplan of God in 70. We had maps which were done by the British. You know, there were no really updated maps, so much so. So we were from a stage where we had very few data, so we had to imagine what the data was. And that's, I think, why many planners were non-quantitative because, you know, they were not much data. And to a point now we have a true abundance of data. But I think all of them are important and useful and we should use them. We have to use. I'm asked very often to review Masterplan or touch your plan or whatever they call them, and I found that there is a similar volume of data. Then they are the commendations at the end and it's a complete non-sequitur. You know, the data they're just there to give a little gravitas to or maybe to add pages, I don't know, to the report. And these are concrete non-sequitur. You know, for instance, every masterplan now talks about sustainability or equity. I have never seen something which would define what the equity will be in terms of outcome. They often they don't see that. And therefore, that's why you have this non-sequitur, you know, at the end to say, we believe in equity. And then, you know, we believe that we should build the road there or the floor ratio should be higher or lower or something like that. There's no real relationship between the two. And I think this is what's wrong. You know, I would like one day when you have an objective that you you define exactly and you quantify, you see after this plan is implemented, this group of people will consume more water or more education or more health. And that will convince me. But say right now, again, we have this qualitative thing. I see that most moral mantra that you put at the end of your planning thing and you use the data to give you gravitas.
Diane Davis That's interesting. You brought up the issue of equity, and you're kind of raising questions about the importance of being able to measure it, not just talk about it as a normative value. One of the questions I sent you, which may be not relevant any more, but was that one could say that one of the common differences or one of the differences commonly assumed to differentiate urban economists from planners is the concern with maximizing maximizing efficiency versus enabling equity. You've already raised some important questions about how do we measure whether we're successful if we want to enable equity. I guess I wanted to know whether you think that's a fair characterization, that economists care more about efficiency and planners care more about equity?
Alain Bertaud No.
Diane Davis Maybe give an example of the work that you've done.
Alain Bertaud I think that I think that it's quite possible for an economist if you define what the equity is to measure it and to establish what data you need to to quantify it. For instance, in my book, I have a graph of income distribution and consumption of housing, and I think you could define equity. There is equity that's below a certain consumption of housing. You the government will provide the fund in order that everybody consume, at least above this minimum. So this is economists are able to work that way. You see if you define it. But if it's just equity without defining what it is, I don't think anybody can fulfill it. So I don't think there's this dichotomy between efficiency. By the way, if something is not efficient, I mean, if transport is not efficient, that means if you it takes you two and a half hour to get your job. I don't think there's an equity in that. You know, you could say, well, it's equitable because you have access to transport, but it will take you to an F hours to get to your job. So I don't think that there is this an enemy between equity and efficiency. I think it's the same aspect of the same problem.
Diane Davis Excellent. And I'm not going to get started on the Orange line in Boston and how much time it takes for taking public transport to get anywhere. But I do want to follow up on this. I really like what you've said and just kind of again, we have students here from the GST and I'm learning also from this conversation. But what I think I hear you suggesting is that one role, one way that planners and urban economists can work together well and they can, but they need some common task is for planners who maybe are more or those who are more qualitative, more grounded, dealing with the community to come up with some ideas about how to define equity so it could be better measured. So they may have a deeper understanding of the barriers to equity, but how to translate that knowledge into something that can be quantified is, I think, what you're arguing, and I think that's really great. So let me ask you a question about the concepts, some of the concepts in your book and coming back to your background as an architect. So in the book, I. I see that you do? Well, I would like to hear your definition of planning or the role of planners and whether a planner is the same as an urban designer. And I asked that because I'm at a school where we're a Department of Urban Planning design, but the urban design program is actually separate from the urban planning program. It has been the bane of my existence. When I was chair of the department, it always wanted those folks to talk together. But the point is, in this book, even in the title, you have design, and you are an architect by training, you go back and forth between planning and design. And I'm just wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you see the kind of those two, are they are they different professions? Planning and design?
Alain Bertaud I think they are complementary positions. I regret very much that in my book. I don't talk about urban design. You know, the use of design in the title is do not concern the design of building a single. It means without plan planning.
Diane Davis Yes.
Alain Bertaud So I regret very much because I think we are dealing at different scale there. You know, the planning is a structure of a city. Urban design is what you do, you know, and the planning of the city is a separation between what is private, what is public. You know, that's the first function of thing where the market will play and where in the streets, you know, the market will take place. So you need you need a lot of design, especially in the area which are public. And the quality of the design or the lack of quality of design can completely destroy all the things you are doing right in the planning. For instance, I will say access to a subway station for the contact between the subway station, the private sector and the public rail. The way it is designed completely, you know, you may have a subway system which work very well, but suddenly this access is not very well-designed. So that's, I think, those aspects and unfortunately, I don't create it at all, although I have observed it a lot. And I think it's a very, very important function the way, for instance, planners tend to measure the number of square meters of parks inhabitants in city. This is, I think, completely irrelevant. Everything as to the quality of design of those blocks. You know, you could have, for instance, in Brasilia, I think you have the maximum number of square meters for the inhabitants. Most of the parks are completely unusable. to the University and anybody there. And the contrary in Hong Kong or even in the Washington Square, in the in the village, in New York, next to NYU. This this park is wonderfully designed, but, at the end. It's still the people. You know, you could have a park like Washington Square, which is well-designed. It is useful because people come to play music. It is useful because some people play chess in it. You could have that. You could design a chess board and everything else, and it could be full of drug addicts and syringes, and it will not fulfill its function. But so the design is there, but it's only the people will make it useful.
Diane Davis I'm loving this conversation so far. Hopefully we can take it back to the GSD. I might mention, I'm going to ask you, just use the word scale when we're talking about urban design and I can't agree with you more about you just can't do a masterplan understanding how people use space, what might enable or constrain them from using space. I want to make a quick point, and I would like to invite you over that there's a huge exhibition in the lobby of the GSD, if anybody's interested on the Grand Paris Express, which won the Veronica Reg Green Prize here this year at the GSD. And there's going to be a big event next week and there's a beautiful exhibition. And really looking at that question about linking, kind of looking at the development of subway stops at Link, both the kind of the center, the peri urban and that region together around infrastructure investment to kind of bring together people and space. So. But let me push you well not push you just ask another version of this question about scale because at the GSD we have faculty practitioners in the design professions work at very different scales. Even over there, they're the people that work at the building scale and then they're people that work at the street scale, and then they're people that work at the neighborhood scale. And then there's the city scale. And I'm not even mentioning the national scale. You and I both work on the Global South, a nation national scale of regulation as well as resources, financing, etc., is relevant for what happens in cities. So I guess I wanted to share a little bit more about what are your thoughts about the most effective scale for producing equitable and prosperous cities. You're interested in cities as a whole. You also underscore that it's very hard, that will be my next question, to act on the scale of the city as a whole. But can you build on some of the things you just say and sing a little bit more about scales of action and scales of operation and the relation of planners and urban economists in thinking about the appropriate scales for you.
Alain Bertaud You have to you have to look to act at every scale from the micro scale. You know, the way the door of a building is designed or a sidewalk is designed to the macro scale, which means the relationship between cities. There is no, you know, if one scale is missing, you all of a sudden may fail altogether. I would compare it to a building, you may design a building very well, but if you fail to design the rebar in your thing, you thing will collapse, you know, so the rebar is part of the design or the design is much more than just the rebar. So I think for a city, it's exactly the same thing. Every scale is important. And that's why every time with my wife, we work in cities, we always try to build case studies, you know, in order to understand, to go in to the lowest, you know, the lowest income part of the city. And to try to understand what people you know, the specific city, the specific family will get in terms of water or space that they sense, you know, we need this micro-scale. And then it doesn't mean that after that, we also look at the larger aspect of the city, including of transport. You know, labor markets work at the scale of a metropolitan area. So you have to go in both scale. Now, should the same person do everything? Probably not, but they should they should communicate very clearly together. Yes. So I think that it's important to work at every skill and the details are important. But then, you know, of the structure of the city is also very important. It's not enough to have the right size of sidewalk if you cannot move from one part of the metropolitan area to another in less than one hour.
Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't agree with you more on this comment about you have to be able to work simultaneous or understand what's happening at multiple scales. Same. But this is a part of the problem. It's not just a problem of planners and economists, over at the GSD we have this problem. So I'm totally supportive and I'm going to I have several more questions, but I'm only going to ask one more or one more in a follow up, and then I'm going to open it to the audience, because building on your point about speaking, you know, just thinking about scales and city visions. So you mentioned in your book that it was you thought it was a mistake and maybe I was reading it incorrectly for mayors to take on grand visioning exercises. That's why it'll be interesting to see the Grand Prix Express exhibition, and it was very central, but also working with architects, economists, they everybody worked together on that. And you also mentioned in the book about the kind of the failures of some of these utopian visions. Radiant city, Garden City. I would throw red Vienna. We were talking about that in my class just last week. But that makes me think if we want to think about the city as a whole, and it's not just a kind of an abstract, utopian political project, you really need political actors that are pragmatic and engaged in the reality of politics and the city. And I teach classes on the politics of governance. And this is my the area that I know most about and I'm a strong advocate for. So I wanted to hear a little more about what you saw as the role of politics and urban governance in city building. You do a little criticism, maybe thinking about the ways in which. I mean, you go through some exercises about the planners or the urban economists and the mayor. None of them can do it alone. But I wanted to hear a little. Somebody has to be driving the train. So what? Who needs to be driving the train? And do you think mayors can actually play that role?
Alain Bertaud I strongly object to the word vision. You know, the vision is personal. You know, an artist has a vision, a philosopher as a vision, a prophet as a vision. Fine. A mayor to me as to be a good janitor, you know. And so it should not you know, it should you know, if you have a vision that means that the other people do not have vision. I believe that individual, entrepreneur or worker in the city all have a vision. And this is legitimate. But the mayor himself, if they're just to provide the infrastructure which supports the vision of those individual, you should not have the vision himself and is not the prophet is not elected to impose his vision on other people. So maybe it's semantic. You know, you could say vision is a word for I plan. But words are important, you know. And you know, if you if words lose their meaning, then or then I think it's influence you know the word you use influence what you are doing even if you use it different. So I think it's important. So take this example of a janitor, you know, a good janitor, a good janitor knows when the heater, you know, the thing has to be changed with the elevator has to be maintained. And whether, you know, it's time to do the roof again and things like that, then that's I think that's the role of the mayor. And the mayor have to recognize that it is the inner bitterness which create who created the wealth of the city. It is not him or some genius guy that creates.
Diane Davis Or her. So I totally I really like that answer. I'm just going to ask one mini question, I promise the last one. I very much hear what you're saying about being careful when we use the word vision, because you said you can use vision from below, but not a single vision like the mayor has it. And I'm going to share with you again, because I'm really interested in cultivating some new knowledge to help our students in planning, planning and urban design. But I wanted to say that at the end of my class, when I teach this urban governance and the politics of planning, I have an exercise that I assign students. I think it's I think you're going to you hopefully you'll appreciate your comments on it. I assign students that's not their choice to one of four groups that they have to be an activist, an elected official or a politician, a bureaucrat, and they don't like I want to use that word, but that's like a planner working in government. Or maybe you won't like this word either a consultant or a technocrat. I throw those together like somebody that works for McKinsey. Maybe an urban economist is not working for a client. Maybe not. But anyway, I assign them those to those four groups and I ask them which sensibility is the most important. I ask them to defend the sensibility of that role as the most important role for a planner. So they are an activist, politician, technocrat, bureaucrat. And surprise, surprise, at the end of the exercise, the students always say, we need all of those sensibilities, which leads us in my work and in my classes to think about planners as mediators. You use the word janitor to talk about the mayor, but could you kind of talk a little bit more about how that not just that role of that everyone needs a take or mediate who's mediating this, which is a different idea than a janitor. How does that happen? Where does that happen and how does that happen? And that's my last question. So get ready for your questions next.
Speaker 2 You know, the city is made of two parts in a way. The inhabitants with their own activities and their own invention. And then an infrastructure, which is so that is grassroot and then an infrastructure which is top down. Because again, just a pure market system will not give you a network of roads or a subway or even the sewer system. You know, you could have a system privately operated, but the design itself within the metropolitan area has to be done by government. So you have these two things together, so the role of the planners or the people who manage the city is to monitor what the people are doing in terms of activity, the change and the way they react. By the way, we haven't talked about that, about external shocks. You know, every city is submitted constantly to external shocks and the city survive if it is able to adapt quickly and adjust their consumption or their way of working to those external shocks. So. The who? The planners. What does the top down think as to adapt to what the people are doing rather than. And this morning I give similar example of that, instead of saying, well, we are going to develop a transport system, but in order for this transport system to work, we need the densities to be aligned along this single day thing. So that means you are going to design the entire, you know, all the trade off that very carefully. Those firms and also the way doing, you are going to annul that by saying, well, for my light rail to work or my or my BRT, you, I need the people to live there and to have high density there and not here. That I think is completely wrong. As a planner, you have to say this is the way the city is evolving. Forces jobs are dispersing in the suburbs. I have to support that with a new type of transport system which will allow the labor market to work. So you see, do you need the one person who is, kind of a maestro in an orchestra? I'm not so sure. I think that, you know, again, the data to monitor what is happening is very important, but and especially to, to see how people adapt. We have now this example with COVID. We have this tug of war between workers who want to work at home and the company would like them to work at the office. We do not have to take part in that. We have to observe what is happening and transform and address our infrastructure to respond to whatever equilibrium result between between this tug of war. So in a way, I'm not sure we need a maestro.
Diane Davis Yes, I totally agree. And we're going to start asking questions. I just want to summarize, if I get, say, the parallel with your I'm totally aligned with your your response, Alain, when I mentioned mediators, I guess I want to summarize this, this is not top down, whether it's planners or mayors or even economists. It's kind of a horizontality. How do you create relationships across these different sectors, the transport planners versus the school planners versus the investments? And this is again, the problem we have in the GSD. Every place is very siloed with their professional expertise. But thinking a little bit more about the horizontal relationships that are important to the scale of the city I think, is you've made that point in an extremely erudite way and thank you so much. So here questions. Please put your hand up if you have a question.
Audience Member Thank you so much for coming to speak with us today. I'm curious whether you see the newest revolution in remote work. And then on a longer medium time span, we've seen IT infrastructure popping up and being able to allow people to communicate and work together without all physically being together in a city center the way that cities, you know, their historical use has been. Do you see this as fundamentally changing the way cities are going to be designed, the need for cities, for economic purposes and so forth?
Alain Bertaud I am still at the point where I like to observe what's happening. You know, if you look at the data, at least in the United States, we have sometimes contract or a doctorate data about different cities. I would like to learn more about that. But personally, I feel that I must work at, as an advantage, certainly, but face to face contact and the randomness of contact when you meet people in the university or at one job or even maybe in the bar, in the restaurant, this randomness is very valuable and could not be abandoned. I think that for people who are older people like me, for instance, remote working or remote is feasible because I have been long a network of people. I've made, you know, I mean, not you know, of runs very much for the few years which are left to me. I think that for younger people who are not will see their career evolve depending. It's very important to meet people again who are not necessarily in their field. And I think that you meet them usually at work. And so I think that this, you know, yes. You know, being able to work randomly two or three days a week will probably improve transport. Certainly, it could also improve housing, you know, in a certain way, the supply of housing. But I don't believe that you can do away entirely with this of face to face and the randomness the randomness of contact. So you could conceive of a labor market, not being just within the metropolitan area, but worldwide. And for some jobs, this is what's happened already for the insurance industry and, you know, decentralize entirely the processing of data in different country. So in a way, you had already this aspect of the centralization, but at the end, you still have workers somewhere who are processing data and with themself need to evolve, maybe learn all the things that they would need to meet people.
Diane Davis I think we have Ricardo. And then there are two questions back there.
Ricardo Hausmann If you were to summarize, the biggest $500 bills lying on the ground or the most significant mistakes that are made in the management of cities that are preventing them from being better. What would be your say, top three ideas or policy priorities or, you know, corrections of the policy framework that you would want to put on the table?
Alain Bertaud Well, the first thing is to consider that transport and housing are two different sectors. I think they are the same sectors. The two aspects of this sector. Transport define in fact the supply of land, which is a variable for housing and for jobs also. So it's a transport system will define it. So it controls the supply. On the other hand, housing is a shelter, of course, but it's a point of departure of commuting to work. But those people will still commute to and that's, I think is very often forgotten. We have seen that when we discussing South Africa. You know, the new policy which the policy since the fall of apartheid was very successful in building a lot of houses of good quality let's face it, very good quality. But in the wrong place it means that people have a nice house but no job at all. So it's not a very good bargain, frankly. So you see that this is, I think, the main thing. The other that I see is, again, optimizing, I think, to optimize one part of the infrastructure at the expense of everything else. And usually it's transport, but it could be something else. You know, imagine that if you wanted to, you know, you could optimize your system, make it much cheaper than what it is by precisely having the sewer plant right in the CBD, you know, in the area, which is the densest. It will it will reduce the cost of a very much. You don't want to do that because again, if you optimize only one element of the infrastructure at the expense of everything else, you do not have an efficient city. An efficient city is to expect the tradeoff that each individual is doing by for location, for their own house and and for the enterprise, for their jobs. And this tradeoff no planners have the knowledge of of those trade off that are done so because we do not have the knowledge. The only thing we can do is to monitor where people are locating, which jobs are locating and trying to serve this, not to force them into it, you know, so-called optimum design.
Audience Member 2 Thank you for writing this wonderful book. My question is centered around evidence based planning or data driven governance. And you brought out the talk about randomness in cities. So with the vast amount of data that we have now, we understand that the data on a lot of diversity in the city and the diverse ways in which people interact with the built environment. But when we want to take this evidence to action, we often see that through the policymaking process. Some of this diversity is lost because bureaucrats often want to put, you know, regression equations to, you know, to derive some sort of result and then inform the policy. So what would be your advice to, you know, still utilize data but preserve that diversity into the policy that goes on for urban areas?
Alain Bertaud Thank you. A difficult question. Made me think. Yes. As we have discussed, we have you know, you should in every in every policy proposal, you should also use some case studies, you know, in order to get some flesh to the statistics. I think this is important. And again, when you are talking about you has to kind of try to aggregate things. It's because also themself are not convinced that what individual people are doing is legitimate and they think that they have a vision or an optimum plan, and that if the people follow the order that this plan requires, things will be better. So if you have this dichotomy, it doesn't matter what data you bring, you know, in a certain way, they will still follow these things. I had an example in Indonesia where there was a bilateral assistance web providing a free light rail to the city of Jakarta. And and they realized when they did the analysis that in order to be financially viable, they needed the certain density along the corridors. And so they asked the planning department, please allow even force you cannot force but say that the planner could force the density in the along the corridors, but prevent higher densities outside because they realized that there was competition, you know, where people were locating in different area. And so you see this is completely wrong, although for their point of view, their job was to have a BRT and build it. It was the only way to get it financially viable. But that's not what it is all about. I have another and another example. When it was the World Bank in the in the city of the knowledge base, they asked me to have a look at just before I arrived, I had the report of a transport engineer who was very competent to have been there but his terms of reference were not go to Danang and find what is the best transport system so people can get to their job faster. It was, look at Danang and see where you can put the BRT. You know, which is a completely different problem. And the guy was a very good engineer. So he showed that you could put the BRT only in high income area because the roads were wide enough and where the 70% of the people are, where workers use motorcycle. And usually it was hilly, you know, around the hills and you could not even bring a regular bus in those area. So he did the analysis and say, well, after you implement your BRT, if the high income area want to take the BRT, they will save 5 minutes on their trip. But for the people using motorcycle, because as you know, the BRT created by you know you can go at across very easily. So that trip would be about 10 minutes longer. So that was and nobody in the bank reacted to that in a certain way, saying, well, we really gave the wrong terms of reference to this poor guy. And so you see, this is very common. So, again, it's one of you know, of the example of something people do all the time.
Diane Davis We have one more question, but I just want to make one comment. It makes me think of this example of the World Bank and the BRT. Sometimes I tell my students that planning can be just as technocratic as urban economics, and sometimes it falls into this pattern of being a solution in search of a problem that, you know, we thought something worked in its place and let's do it there. Without getting to the specificity, whether it's with data. Quantitative, qualitative that you mentioned in the World Bank. So that's a super interesting problem. All of us that we need to think about. Just because you found a kind of a measure that deals with some of the problems you care about doesn't mean you can expand it everywhere or that you should then formalize that as your profession, kind of looking and making sure every place has a BRT set up anyway.
Audience Member 3 Hi. Thank you. One question that I have is you sort of object to this idea of a quote unquote vision. And I want to dig more into that because I definitely think that there does need to be visionary planning done. I think, for example, the example of the exhibition in the GSD with the Grand Paris, I think there was a vision there and it was for a regional transit system. And I think in countries outside the United States there is a greater emphasis on regional planning. So my question is, you know, in the context of the United States, do you think that there does need to be more grand visioning just because of the mass siloization of, you know, government bureaucracy in the United States? I think that almost stratifies different sectors of government in order to plan more effectively. So I think there does need to be a grand vision on certain products.
Alain Bertaud We are having a dispute on semantics. I am not saying that you should not have somebody will say, hey, things will work better. If we had, you know, communication between this part of the region and the other. But to me, this is not the vision. This is just you're applying your skill. You know, does somebody a baker, which makes a very good croissant have a vision. No, he's a very good baker. And I think that if you are a transport economist and you work with an economist or a labor economist, you can come up with things saying, you see, if we add this type of transport because of this is the way now the labor is distributed, these things work better. You know, we will remove, you know, we will expand, the labor market will make it so. So it's this is not a vision to me, It's just doing your job that, you know, you could call it that way.
Diane Davis I'm sorry. I think we're going to have to end this extremely stimulating conversation. I'm going to make one more comment, as you could guess, but I wish we had another hour with you, Alain, and this has just been an amazing discussion. I guess just getting back to the issue of visioning and maybe trying to link that with scale. I think that I love the example, of course, of a Baker making a crossaint, but certain urban problems, and especially when we think of the city are so complex, have so many elements are different sectors as you mention you can't think about housing without transit. You can't think about and think about jobs that are so many elements. And of course, a baker might have butter or flour, yeast, etc. But when we started thinking about the scale of the urban that somehow or another to get all the right people talking about where you want to go, how you want to create that baguette or whatever. But if you're talking about the scale of a region, you might need some you may need to be able to articulate what that is that you're trying to create to get all those people on board. So I'm just. Next time we talk, we'll talk a little. And it speaks to scale, but also the complexity, the horizontal conversation that has to happen. Let me just end this by saying that we didn't even scratch the surface of all of the amazing examples given in here. And I had a lot of questions about the Global South versus the global North, the pandemic you brought up. There's so much more to learn from you Alain. So thank you so much for being here with us today.