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.

Alain Bertaud: Let cities find their own order

Cities are shaped by millions of individual decisions. When people choose where to live, work and build, an order emerges from their combined choices – what urbanists call "spontaneous order." It arises from markets and human interactions, not from master plans.

When planners impose rigid design visions without understanding these forces, they produce unintended consequences: housing shortages, long commutes and inefficient land use.