Order Without Design

Bertaud worked as an urban planner for the World Bank and in cities across the world, and argues that planners should treat cities as labour markets rather than as objects to be designed, and that urban economics should govern planning rather than aesthetic or spatial preferences.

His central claim is that a city's function is to give workers access to the largest possible number of jobs and firms access to the largest possible pool of workers, and that everything else follows from this. He operationalises it through the measure of how many jobs are reachable within a given commuting time, which he uses to evaluate transport and land use decisions directly.

His analysis of land use regulation is the most pointed. He argues that minimum lot sizes, floor area ratio limits, height restrictions, parking requirements and greenbelts each restrict supply and raise prices, and that planners impose them without calculating the effect on the households excluded. He documents specific cases including Mumbai's floor area ratio restrictions, which produced extreme density in slums adjacent to underdeveloped land, and the effects of urban growth boundaries.

He covers the spatial structure of cities empirically, showing that most large cities have become polycentric rather than monocentric, and that transport planning based on the monocentric model fails. His position on informal settlements is that they are a rational response to regulation that prices formal housing out of reach. Bertaud writes as a practitioner and the book is technical in places. He is unsympathetic to planning as a discipline, which some readers will find one-sided. The framing of cities as labour markets and the measurement of job accessibility are the durable contributions.