A few months ago I wrote about an upcoming book by Alain Bertaud called, Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Well the book has just come out and CityLab just did an interview with him. 

Bertaud has worked all around the world from Yemen to China and his experiences, particularly in places that were transitioning to market economies, lend an interesting perspective.

I like this bit on designing in China:

I quickly realized that if you do not have prices to guide you, you end up relying on arbitrary norms. For example, in China, the central government decided that every home must have one full hour of sunshine each day. So you would plug in the height, latitude, and angle of the sun at winter solstice for your site, and that would formulaically spit out the permitted density of housing.

And I like the comparison he makes between food and housing supply:

I compare it to food: You can’t solve a famine by simply mandating that everyone eat 2,000 calories a day. That’s absurd. You have to bring in more food. In the same way, cities like San Francisco have to increase the supply of floor area, and let consumers determine the size of units.

So I just ordered a copy of his book. 

For the rest of his interview with CityLab, click here.

Taylor Pearson recently compared crypto networks to cities and argued that the best crypto networks, much like the best cities, are formed from the bottom up. 

The example he gives is that of Paris (bottom-up) vs. Brasilia (top-down). Paris is the hugely successful city and Brasilia is the failure of high-modernism.

I appreciate the argument he’s making and I do agree with him on the potential of decentralization, but I couldn’t help but dig into his city example a bit further.

The Paris we all know and love today is the result of an enormous centrally planned urban renewal exercise. Baron Haussmann carved, among many other things, long straight boulevards through Paris’ medieval fabric in order to modernize and rationalize the city.

What makes this top-down exercise different from that of Brasilia’s? Is it simply that Haussmann was constrained by Paris’ existing and decidedly urban fabric?

Because then we could turn our attention to New York City’s gridiron plan of 1811, which laid out – before the island of Manhattan had even fully developed – a relentless and orthogonal street network from Houston Street all the way up to 155th Street.

Is the difference that Brasilia was planned with suburban sensibilities in mind and Manhattan was not? Or was it the restrictive Euclidean zoning that did it in for Brasilia? 

Whatever the case may be, history suggests that some top-down planning exercises may have worked out just fine. Though to be fair, each of them was not without their share of critics.

Photo by Rafael Leão on Unsplash

Earlier this month I wrote about California Senator Scott Wiener’s bill to increase housing supply and mandate greater land-use intensities adjacent to transit. Here is that post.

Judging by the comments, many of you seemed to think this was a fairly sensible proposal. I know I certainly did. Senator Wiener called it a housing-first agenda, as opposed to a housing-last agenda.

So I thought it would be interesting to share how some people have responded to the proposal. 

Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz called it both “devastating” and “the worst idea [he’s] ever heard.” He went on to tell the LA Times that, within 10 years, people should expect their neighborhoods to be transformed into Dubai. 

His conclusion: “I don’t think people want to see significant rezoning around single-family neighborhoods whether they’re near transit or not.”

I don’t agree with his first set of remarks, but I agree with his second one. And that, of course, is the challenge. If you own a single-family home down the street from transit, what great incentive do you have to support intensification?

Paul is the messenger.