Expert 01: Alain Bertaud

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In our inaugural episode of the Expert series, RedBlue speaks with Alain Bertaud, Senior Fellow at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. He is the author of a book about markets and the practice of urban planning titled “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” published by MIT Press in December 2018. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port au Prince (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).

In this conversation, we cover a number of different topics, including how innovation can be leveraged in the process of helping cities to grow, the importance of humility at certain times for open planners, the importance of looking at data and information in order to get city planning right, and also the importance of acting in order to achieve specific outcomes. Alain grounds these lessons in very concrete examples of how different cities operate and different things have played out over the length of his career.

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