Dr Eric Crampton: We need to learn how to make liveable cities

Too many of the world’s urban planners grew up playing the city-planning game SimCity. You may have played it too. It’s fun, but it’s a terrible guide both to urban planning and to how cities work. It rewards micromanaging the wrong parts of cities.

Alain Bertaud did not grow up playing SimCity.

Bertaud is one of the world’s most influential urban planners.

His career began in the 1960s, as a draftsman for Le Corbusier working on Chandigarh, India. Over the decades that followed, he worked as a resident urban planner in cities like Bangkok, San Salvador, New York and Paris.

During his time as principal urban planner for the World Bank, he advised local and national governments in China, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, Mexico and more. His book, Order without Design, draws on five decades of experience across some forty cities and is a touchstone for urbanists across the political spectrum.

And he is currently visiting New Zealand.

SimCity presents a fairly static vision of cities and a strongly dirigiste view of the urban planner’s role. Nothing happens until the planner directs it. And land values depend on the things the planner provides, rather than the value the city’s residents create.

Bertaud’s cities are alive and dynamic. And thinking about his cities requires starting with labour markets.

In Bertaud’s view, cities primarily are labour markets. We live together in bigger places so we can work together more productively – and then enjoy the amenities that that productivity can build.

People have to be able to move around in cities, choosing the jobs that are right for them today, and picking new ones as they gain experience and as conditions change. The more jobs that are within a short commute, the better.

The urban planner’s job then isn’t to impose their vision of the good life on the city’s residents. Whether the planner personally prefers living in apartments or in houses in subdivisions should not matter.

Sometimes, urban planners think their job is to make people live near trunk infrastructure, so that that infrastructure has the lowest possible cost-per-user. But that’s like deciding not to go and visit your grandmother because the road is a bit hilly and your car would get better mileage if you went to the beach instead. Good mileage is important, but it is hardly the only thing that matters. Economic outcomes matter far more than engineering metrics.

So the planner’s real job is ensuring that the city functions as well as possible for the people who will live there.

Corridors for transportation must be separated from the private spaces joined by them. Parks and other public spaces need to be well planned. Doing it well means people’s commutes are short enough to leave time for leisure, that plenty of potential employers are within a reasonable commute, and access to social life and nature is straightforward.

Cities are labour markets. Mobility determines the size of that labour market.

People’s choices matter in Bertaud’s cities. Those choices wind up being reflected in urban land prices. If one place becomes more desirable, land prices there will increase. Increasing land prices mean people will try to use less land per dwelling: they will build upward. Infrastructure must follow to support that growth.

Good planning then brings a mix of top-down design for public spaces including roads, and spontaneous order in private spaces. It’s one of the reasons his work resonates across ideological lines.

Urban land prices can be one useful indicator for planners wanting to ensure that cities keep up with their residents’ changing needs. So can local incomes. What kind of housing can people afford on about 30% of their income? Has the city allowed enough development to satisfy those needs?

If zoning has prevented building in places where people want to live, that artificial scarcity will show up as price differences at zoning boundaries. Rolling out the infrastructure to support more housing while relaxing zoning restrictions can make a lot of sense.

Sometimes, cities will impose other land-use restrictions like viewshafts. Those restrictions can have benefits. But it is always worth monitoring their cost as the city changes. Preventing development at height across a large swath of a city may have little cost when few people want to live there. Monitoring those costs as a city grows can help planners know when restrictions should ease.

Bertaud’s conclusions aren’t abstract theory. They come from decades measuring real cities with his wife and partner, GIS-expert Marie Agnès: mapping densities, commuting times, and land prices across dozens of countries.

His work asks planners to stop thinking like SimCity designers and start thinking more like economists about incentives, trade-offs, and how real people use cities.

Urban reform under the prior Labour government and the current National government is influenced by Bertaud’s work. He will be speaking as part of Auckland Council’s Auckland Conversations series at Aotea Centre on Thursday evening.

For a country grappling with housing costs and growing cities, Bertaud offers a practical way of thinking about making cities work better.

Dr Eric Crampton is Chief Economist at the New Zealand Initiative. This article was first published HERE