Q&A: Alain Bertaud

It made quite the splash among urban planners: urban planning, by definition, emphasizes that order in cities is a consequence of design and of plans. It is an article of faith that urban planners shape cities. The argument that other forces might in fact predominate was seen as heterodox, if not heretical.

Over the intervening years, however, as housing crises in nearly all major North American cities have worsened — despite an increasing number of plans and planners — some have taken a second and a third look at Bertaud’s work.

There is much more of an understanding now among urban planners that housing in these cities is expensive because there’s not enough of it — and that there’s not enough of it in large part due to municipal land-use rules and regulations. This is an economic explanation of the crisis cities face, one that suggests that markets do in fact shape cities and that rules and regulations in turn shape markets.

We spoke to Alain Bertaud about this shift in thinking and to expand on some of the key ideas from his book.

What inspired you to write Order without Design? What messages did you hope to convey to readers in general and to urban planners in particular?

I’ve worked in many different cities — cities with different cultures, different climates, different economies — but I found that there were a lot of commonalities between those cities. I observed, the way regulations, which were well intended, decrease the housing supply: they prevent change where all cities need change. All cities are confronted with crises, with external shocks, and they need to adapt.

I’ve spent a lot of time in informal settlements¹ all over the world. That taught me a lot, because those informal settlements are usually completely rational, given the constraints they are facing.² They have shortcomings, obviously, but those are very often caused by government action. I don’t believe in conspiracies or anything. I do believe very much that incompetence and ignorance have an influence people are not aware of.

There is this quotation from Albert Hirschman³ about the weak being oppressed by the incompetent. I think that’s what’s happening in cities, in a way. Many governments refuse to admit that there are quite a number of people who cannot afford middle-class housing or know what to do with that. They will say, “Oh, we will provide for them, we will build public housing.” They never do it, because it’s not affordable for the government. It’s not affordable for the people, but it’s not affordable for the government either. We have a lot of false ideas like that.

There is also another aspect which struck me, which is that people who manage cities have strategies or regulation the outcomes of which are opposite of those policies’ objectives. In spite of that, they continue with those policies. Let me give you an example. In Mumbai, they say they cannot increase the floor-area ratio, because the density will be too high. But if you measure the density in Mumbai, the very high densities are in slums, which are completely horizontal, where people cannot afford to build higher. Mumbai is one of the most congested cities in the world, in spite of this policy, and nobody says, “Well, maybe we could change the policy.”

That’s what pushed me to write this book. It’s a swan song or something like that, given my age. But I thought that it was time.

Speaking of policy outcomes being the opposite of what the policy intention was, we hear a lot of talk from urban planners, including in cities like Toronto and New York City, that one of their key objectives is affordability. Of course, the outcome of many of these policies is that these are some of the most unaffordable cities in the world. What is it about urban planning, that has such a mismatch between the intention and the outcome? If I think about structural engineers, if the intention was to build a bridge that didn’t collapse and it did collapse, we might throw the whole profession away and start over. What is urban planning in particular getting wrong?

I think that one thing is that not so long ago, when I started my career, it was very difficult to get data on cities. There was no CAD system.⁴ You had to measure area, for instance, with a little mechanical gizmo. I think that planners in general got into the habit of being qualitative rather than quantitative because it was easier.

Then, of course, there is also among planners and engineers a complete ignorance of the relevant markets. They ignore the market because what disturbs them very much, for instance, is the changing price of land.

An engineer or an architect knows the price of cement, knows the price of steel. Because they are commodities, they fluctuate. But they don’t understand why the price of land will vary. They decide that it is speculation — that if the land prices in a city become very high, it’s because of speculation. Recently, I was in Brazil and I saw that one of the reasons being given there for imposing a uniform floor ratio in the city of Belo Horizonte was the planners saying it would be unjust to increase the floor ratio in the downtown area, because then the land price will go up.

Rent control is another aspect of it. If rents are going up, let’s just put in a rule that they cannot go up — and planners don’t realize what the impact of that will be in the long term.

I think one reason for this lack of quantitative instinct, lack of understanding of the market, is that planners are disturbed by change. Very often, when I discuss housing policy in different cities, they start by saying, “Well, we should have reasonable land price and reasonable interest rates.” There’s no such thing as a “reasonable” interest rate — it depends on external shocks that are hitting us.

I think one example of this — of a qualitative measure that seems a little too loosey-goosey for anybody to be held accountable for it — is this idea of livability, right? We hear a lot about wanting to plan for livable communities, but one measure of a community’s livability is whether people can actually afford to live in it. That doesn’t factor in to this kind of qualitative measure.

I blame planners and mayors. Let’s just say there is support for the city not changing at all. There are a number of people who are well installed in cities and they see any change in the city, whether it’s in the transport system or the height of building or land use, as a threat to what they are used to. It’s a form of conservatism in a certain way. I think that many regulations are in fact responding to a demand to slow down any change and even to prevent any change. There is a constituency for that. It’s not just the ignorance of market — it goes beyond that.

There is also, I think, in the democratic economy, a delusion of property rights where practically everybody can sue you when you develop something on your lot by pretending that they suffer an enormous negative externality. I’ve seen that recently in New York, with this case of the condo tower at 200 Amsterdam Avenue, where one of the objections is that it’s not in the character of the neighbourhood, which is a very vague concept.

It’s fair to describe your book, I think, as in part a critique of conventional urban planning. Despite that, the book, as far as I can tell, has been very well received and has been very influential among urban planners. What have you seen in terms of reaction from either individual planners or planners as a professional group?

It’s been relatively positive, yes. Some do get defensive. Instead of looking at the outcome, they say, “If we do what you advocate, developers will make a lot of profit.” They don’t see developers are intermediaries between them and a final product. What they could rightly criticize is the type of product developers are putting on the market, but they stop at the developer itself, which I think is irrelevant. The important thing is the outcome.

With housing policy, we talk about built form articulation in the architecture, walkability, livability, but almost never affordability. Similarly, when I see transportation-planning exercises, there’s a lot of discussion of complete streets, road diets — all these things that focus on kind of every variable other than, Will this help people get to work faster or slower?

Yes, exactly. There is also another aspect which struck me, especially when I studied the zoning of New York, which is that you have enormous number of very detailed regulations about the design of a building: the size of the bathrooms, whether the door should open one way or another. It’s very detailed. But there’s practically nothing about the design of streets and the public space. This is completely neglected. Planners are not interested in the public realm; they are more interested in what is private.

It’s the same, by the way, for parks or anything. Many cities measure the number of square metres, square feet of park per person. But design is everything in a park. It’s not just about the number of square metres. It’s about whether it is a nice park, well designed, intensively used. Some parks are never used. The design is very important.

You also write that it’s important to consider this constraint that planners have, which is politics. Planners work within a paradigm where whatever they propose or advance needs to be approved by politicians who themselves need to get elected by the people that might not want more density in their backyard or might not want more traffic on their street. One clear illustration of this in Toronto is a recent trend, because of how acute the housing crisis has become, of malls and strip malls being redeveloped into high-density, mixed-use development projects. Urban planners, to their credit, never take this opportunity to create a new detached house neighbourhood, even though that’s the kind of prevailing context.

Yes.

We do see these examples where they do have of a blank slate where they’re going for mixed use, they’re going for high density, and they’re being more responsive to what the market is calling for.

Yes.

With that in mind, how would you weight your optimism versus your pessimism about urban planning catching up to some of the insights you’re trying to share?

I think ideas are important and that distributing ideas is also very important. I’ve seen it in a number of countries where the press takes a serious attitude to these problems and tries to cover even technical aspects of them, tries to popularize these debates. Ideas should not just be exchanged between technocrats like me — they should be explained.

I think those ideas, they take time, but eventually they percolate. It’s like water getting into the ground and coming out later, in the springtime. So I’m rather optimistic about that. I have seen some change. During my last trip to Brazil, I visited four different cities, meeting with municipal councils and planners and the private sector and universities. I found that there were a lot of people very receptive to these ideas: they were saying, “Well, we tried something different, it didn’t work. Let us try something else.” I think that’s the right attitude. 

Another positive trend has been the emergence of this YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement, which is mostly made up of younger people who are pro-cities. They understand that a city should be a city. A city shouldn’t just be a suburb district or something like that. They’re pro-growth and they’re by and large more economically literate than a lot of people who’ve been commenting on cities in the past.

You could get also new type of coalitions of people who are seriously concerned about housing for the poor and realize that building more public housing is not the solution. We should have some housing built for the people who are in the street, who are handicapped — whatever circumstances. It should not be more than 3 or 4% of the housing stock.

In New York, what we are talking about when we talk about affordable housing is housing that is subsidized by the government. Usually, this means subsidized by taxing housing stock which is not affordable — market housing. Which, in turn, makes that market housing less affordable. It’s kind of a bizarre attitude. Also, to me, any program which requires a lottery, like in affordable housing in Manhattan, where you have 100,000 people applying for 100 dwelling units: this is not serious.

This is the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, housing was practically free — except that you had to wait 30 years for an apartment. It was the equivalent of the price of three packs of cigarette per month, that was a normal rent in the Soviet Union. But you had to share an apartment with three families for 30 years before you were entitled to an apartment. Anything which has a waiting line of several years is not a serious solution.

Having been an urban planner yourself for many years, in many different roles across many countries, aside from this way of thinking that I think you communicate very well in your book, what would you say to a young urban planner who’s maybe reading this interview or coming across your material in other ways? What words of advice or wisdom would you give them?

Try to get acquainted with all the different ways we can measure the activities of cities: the speed of transport, number of building permits, size of new houses being built, all these things which are now available. Try to be very familiar or to build a database or at least to know people who know how to build a database. After that, get yourself acquainted with geographical information system and things like that. And then jump into it and try to visit different cities. People who live always in the same city know that city extremely well. They know the story of every building — they see the city as a unique thing. They don’t see that it is not unique. In fact, it could be transformed, it should change. So that would be my advice.

There is also one aspect that I neglect in my book which I feel is important, which is urban design. The way a street is designed, a sidewalk, or even the entrance of a subway system is very important. The contact between the private realm and the public one is important. If you have just a wall, a blank wall, again, it’s not a very livable city.

In every city, there is also some informal housing. I don’t mean slums but buildings which are subdivided illegally. I think that you can learn from that. The only real contribution to affordable housing for the lowest 20th percentile of income in New York has been through illegal subdivision of existing individual housing: detached housing which is used illegally by four or five families, including renting a garage or something like that. I think that planners should try to be aware of it and say, “Okay, those people are breaking the law, but why do they do it? They have no alternative. What could we do so that those people could have maybe the same type of housing, but legally?”

Do not be patronizing. I think that the problem with urban planners is that they often have a good idea and they think that they can impose those ideas on other people. You should take seriously whatever people are doing and try to find solutions to match. UP

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Footnotes:
1 Slums and favelas, where property rights are not well defined and any existing zoning and building-code ordinances are only very loosely enforced

2 Even though these communities may seem chaotic and are not formally planned, they still follow discernible, rational principles, for example, taking shape near a central business district rather than government housing that’s much further away.

3 The 20th century German economist was writing about what he called exit: the phenomenon of people who have the financial ability to abandon a situation (a city, a school system, a transit network) they find unsatisfactory, leaving only poorer people behind. Hirschman argued that these departures perpetuate dynamics of despair and exploitation for the people who do not have the capacity to exit. For more, see his book Exit, Voice and Loyalty

4 CAD stands for computer-aided design and refers to the use of software to visualize designs in two or three dimensions.

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