Housing is Ireland’s biggest problem. But Ireland is not alone in this. All over the rich world, people are struggling with housing costs. And all over the world, people are having debates about how to fix housing, and how to make their cities work better. 

Few people have a more global view of housing than Alain Bertaud. Bertaud has worked in Algeria, India, China, Indonesia, the US, Vietnam, South Africa, Brazil, Poland, France, Hungary, Russia, probably many more.

He retired from his work as the principal urban planner of the World Bank in 1999, and now he’s a senior research scholar at New York University. In 2019, he found wider fame when he published his book Order Without Design, which summarises his learnings from his 40-year career as a planner. 

The central tension in Bertaud’s book is between the architect/planner way of looking at cities, and the economist’s way of looking at cities.

The architects and planners take a top down perspective. Architects try to make the city better by designing it better. 

Economists, by contrast, take the bottom up view. They would say that the way to make a city better is to delegate design decisions to individuals. 

The planner’s advantage is that they get to take a bird’s eye view. And in theory, they can coordinate decisions for the common good. 

The advantage of the bottom up view, the urban economist’s view, is that individuals have a better idea of what they want than planners, they’re closer to the problem, they have better information. 

You might not realise it, but this ideological fight is shaping cities all over the world. And it’s the basis on which all of our urban problems are being played out. Each side — the architects and economists — have totally different diagnoses and totally different solutions to the problems of our cities. 

Alain Bertaud is an apostate. He trained as an architect and worked with the renowned Le Corbusier on his his most ambitious project — Chandagarh, a new city in India. But over the course of his long career, Alain came to rejects the worldview of the architects. And now, despite having no formal training, I think he could be fairly considered one of the world’s foremost urban economists.

The key question

Planning a city is a complicated matter, as Dublin City Council’s 814-page city development attests. For Bertaud, it boils down to the delineation between private and public space. As he said in this week’s podcast:

“The important thing for planners is to separate very clearly and long in advance, what is the public realm – which is not submitted to market – and the private land. 

“You do not have a market mechanism to allocate the correct amount of street space to cars, buses or bicycles or whatever. So you have to design it. And so a city can transform itself when the planners concentrate more of their attention on the use of the public space, and a little less on the use of the private space.

“My experience is that in most cities, including New York City, where I live, there’s an enormous amount of attention given to the the use of the private space, and including a lot of constraints which are completely arbitrary. And there’s a complete neglect of the public space. If you take a picture of a of Fifth Avenue during rush hour, it’s a complete mess. The sidewalk is obstructed by old telephone poles and things like that, you have garbage in the street. 

“But, by contrast, at every block, the regulation will tell you exactly how high the buildings can be, the maximum number of apartments, things like that. They go into details — the size of the bathroom, and things like that. So I guess it’s a shift of attention.”

The good thing about tall buildings 

Tall buildings are a bone of contention between planners and economists. Planners tend to dislike them, economists tend to like them. I ask Bertaud, what’s the downside of banning tall buildings in central locations?

“Trips become more more difficult,” he told me. “You have more commuting time. You have also less efficient use of land. If you look at Paris, Paris has the same restrictions on the height of buildings. Although it has a huge concentration of jobs, and as a consequence, many jobs are going to the suburbs. 

“Usually also the centre of a city has a very high level of amenities — theatres, cinemas, restaurants — which are very attractive. That makes housing in the centre extremely expensive, because it’s attractive to be next to restaurants and things like that. And you have, by necessity, enormous gentrification. Even medium income people will be pushed far away in the suburbs, and will be deprived of amenities.

“Cities are about mixing people. It’s interesting to mix with people who are different from you. And, and then the consequence of that is you build large cities of people who are exactly in the same income bracket and they never exposed to different types of people, different type of life, I think it’s terrible. It is not good for the rich, it’s not good for the poor.”

The trouble with 15 minute cites

A trendy idea in urban planning is the fifteen minute city: the idea that you work and spend your money no more than a fifteen minute journey from where you live. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is its most famous champion, and DCC and the Dublin Chamber of Commerce are in favour of it. For Bertaud, the 15-minute city idea fundamentally misses the point of a city: a place where people can have a wide range of job opportunities:

“About 1/3 of the people who live in the centre of Paris are commuting to the suburbs. And even the faraway server and there is even something like four or five per cent of people who live in the centre of Paris commute more than 40 kilometres.

“Now, why is that? It’s not a lack of jobs in Paris… This is the way a labour market works… you come to Paris, because there are five million jobs in Paris. And that gives you a security for your employment, but also an enormous choice during your career.”

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