Alain Bertaud's Order without Design explained: cities as labour markets and the planner's job

Alain Bertaud spent half a century planning cities, and his book argues that planners have been asking the wrong question. Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities came out with MIT Press in 2018. Its pitch is that urban planning would serve people far better if it borrowed the tools of urban economics, and that a city's shape comes mostly from markets responding to infrastructure, whatever the master plan says. For radical centrism's housing debate in Spain, it is the most useful book on the reading list about what planners should actually do.

Who Bertaud is

Bertaud was born in 1939 and trained as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the early 1960s he worked as a draftsman in Chandigarh under Pierre Jeanneret, then as a resident planner in cities including Tlemcen, Sana'a, Port-au-Prince, San Salvador and Bangkok. From 1980 to 1999 he was the World Bank's principal urban planner, working on about 40 cities on four continents. He is now a senior fellow at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management. M. Nolan Gray, reviewing the book for City Journal in 2019, called him the Indiana Jones of urban planning and the book a magnum opus.

Cities are labour markets

The book's central idea fits in a sentence. Cities are primarily labour markets. People put up with noise, crowding and high costs because a big city gives them access to many employers, and employers access to many specialised workers. Bertaud made the point vividly at a talk at Ryerson University in Toronto in 2019, reported by Novae Res Urbis: everything we like about city life, the cafés, concerts and parks, depends on a labour market that works.

From there, the test for any plan is how many jobs people can reach within a reasonable commute. That makes transport central. Gray's review notes that Bertaud reframes mobility as a question of how to allocate scarce road and rail space so that commuting times fall. It also explains his scepticism of a fashionable planning ideal, the self-contained "urban village" where people live and work in the same neighbourhood. In the Toronto talk he argued that employers don't choose staff by their address and specialised workers don't pick jobs by proximity, so the urban village model fragments the labour market of a large city and makes little economic sense.

Planners versus economists

Bertaud describes two professions talking past each other. Planners are normative: they set goals like sustainable, liveable and resilient without quantitative indicators to measure them. Urban economists build models of how incomes, transport costs and land prices shape cities. He wants teams of both.

His sharpest criticism is aimed at regulation that fixes outcomes in advance. Planners often believe in optimal densities and enforce them through zoning, setbacks, floor-space limits, street widths, parking requirements and the like. When those rules hold density below demand, people end up in overcrowded legal units or informal housing. His most cited example, set out in the Wikipedia summary of his work, is Mumbai, where the permitted floor space index fell from 4.5 in 1964 to roughly 1 to 1.33 in most residential zones while the population grew from about 4 million to over 20 million. In Toronto he described how New York's rules on unit numbers and sizes produced flats too big and too expensive for the people who needed homes.

What he recommends follows directly. Remove regulatory barriers on densities and apartment sizes. Increase the supply of land by building new and faster transport. Simplify building permits and cut processing times. Allow different housing types to sit side by side. Planners should provide infrastructure, monitor market signals such as land prices and density gradients, and intervene mainly to correct clear negative externalities. In Gray's words, they should deliver the facts and explain the trade-offs, and leave the decision to voters.

What critics say

Gray thinks the book's blind spot is politics. Bertaud writes for professional planners who, in a city like New York, hold little power against a battle of special interests and neighbourhood opposition, so they also need a political strategy. A 2023 review on the Talking Transport blog praises the labour-market chapters and raises a deeper objection. Bertaud accepts that car users don't pay for road space, congestion or pollution. If those costs go unpriced, then limits such as urban growth boundaries can be a reasonable second-best response, and the reviewer finds the argument weakest in the mobility chapter.

What Spain can take from it

Bertaud's method fits Spain's problem well. The Bank of Spain's 2025 annual report, as Alimarket reported in June 2026, proposes raising building density on land already in the process of urban transformation in tight markets. Matching the average density of consolidated urban areas would add about 500,000 homes beyond current plans, and matching city-centre densities up to 1.2 million, across Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, Valencia, Zaragoza and Seville. It is a Bertaud proposal in all but name: work with the density that land prices are asking for.

The radical-centre synthesis takes three pieces. From the left, the public role in transport and trunk infrastructure, which Bertaud himself stresses lets lower-income households live where homes are affordable and still reach most of the city. From the market-liberal tradition, his respect for what land prices and people's choices reveal, and his case against rules that fix densities and flat sizes from a desk. And from neither, his picture of the planner as an adviser armed with data, who judges every plan by the number of jobs people can reach and lays out the trade-offs for elected officials to decide. Our explainer on developable land applies the same idea to land servicing; the week's later pieces on zoning and transport take it further.