Alain Bertaud

Alain Bertaud (born 1939) is a French urban planner and author. He is a Senior Fellow at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. During a twenty-year career at the World Bank (1980–1999), he participated in urban infrastructure and housing projects across approximately 40 cities on four continents.

His book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (MIT Press, 2018) argues that urban planners should understand cities primarily as labor markets shaped by infrastructure networks and market forces, rather than as objects of design.

Education and early career

Bertaud studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1958 to 1967, receiving the Architecte DPLG (Diplômé par le Gouvernement) qualification.

Before joining the World Bank, Bertaud worked as a resident urban planner in Tlemcen (Algeria), Sana'a (Yemen), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), San Salvador (El Salvador), and Bangkok (Thailand).

Key ideas

Cities as labor markets

Bertaud's central thesis is that a city functions primarily as a labor market, an agora where residents find matches between their skills and employer needs. City productivity depends on the size of the labor market accessible within a reasonable commute. Transportation infrastructure determines the commute shed that defines the labor market's extent, making infrastructure investment the most consequential planning decision.

Mumbai FSI critique

Bertaud's most influential case study concerns Mumbai's Floor Space Index (FSI) regulations. Mumbai's FSI has decreased from 4.5 in 1964 to approximately 1.0–1.33 in most residential zones, even as the city's population grew from 4 million to over 20 million. Bertaud argues this artificial density restriction creates the world's most expensive slums, where residents pay high prices for small, poorly ventilated rooms because the zoning code prohibits building upward to meet demand.

Order Without Design

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities was published by MIT Press in 2018. The book synthesizes Bertaud's career-long argument that planners should focus on providing infrastructure and monitoring market indicators (land prices, density gradients) while intervening only to correct negative externalities, rather than attempting to design entire cities from scratch. The book draws on case studies from cities including Mumbai, Brasília, Seoul, Moscow, and New York City.

Selected publications