Alain Bertaud: Australia’s world-leading urban design

Alain Bertaud has worked in over forty cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without land markets — in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict the market's ability to produce floor space — in Mumbai, in New York, and, indeed, in Australian cities.

In 2018, he synthesised sixty years of field work into a book: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, published by MIT Press. It became, quickly, one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing the most robust framework available for combining urban economics with urban planning.

In two hours of conversation, we cover the functioning of cities as labour markets, what communist cities taught him about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient — with specific numbers, rather than adjectives. 

We also got, at the very end, an admission from Bertaud: that leaving the importance of urban design out of Order Without Design was a mistake, and Australia, of all places, is the one that convinced him this was so.

Purchase Order Without Design: https://yimby-melbourne.square.site/product/order-without-design-how-markets-shape-cities-alain-bertaud/PQ5DV6J7VMNTEI3SC7W5XEDE

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

When we offered Olan Bateau a day off in Sydney, he had a choice: Bondai Beach, one of the most famous stretches of coastline in the world, or Paramatta, a suburban center 24 kilometers from the CBD, which most tourists would never think to visit. Without hesitating, Alan chose Paramatta. He'd seen Sydney's master plan and had questions about it. The plan for Sydney, depending when you last checked, envisions either three or six quasi-independent centers, a polycentric city, each node self-contained. Paramatta is supposed to be one of those nodes. For Bateau, who has spent 60 years refining the thesis that cities are fundamentally labor markets, the plan had a problem. Planning for three equal centers doesn't mean you get three equal centers. And sure enough, today Paramatta has a 20% office vacancy. Meanwhile, Central Sydney sits at almost half that, 13%. The city remains weighted towards its natural center. I'm Jonathan O'Brien, editor-in-chief at Inflection Points, and this is the Inflection Points Podcast. Today we're speaking with Alain Bateau, former principal planner at the World Bank, and an architect, planner, and urban economist. Bateau has worked in over 40 cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without labor markets, in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict markets' ability to deliver floor space in Mumbai, in New York, and indeed on this trip across Australian cities. In 2018, Bateau synthesized 60 years of field work into a book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. It was published by MIT Press, and it's become very quickly one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing one of the most robust frameworks available for combining urban economics with urban planning. In two hours of conversation today, we cover the functioning of cities as labor markets, what communist cities taught Alain about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient, with specific numbers rather than abstract adjectives. We also at the very end get an admission from Bateau that leaving the importance of urban design, that structural street-level planning out of his book was a mistake. And it was Australia of all places that convinced him this was the case. And now to hear it from the man himself, here is Alain Bateau. Alain Bateau, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. It's always a pleasure first to come to Australia. You're 87, you've worked in over 40 cities, and you're in Australia walking around, giving public lectures. You've been remarkably unstoppable this tour. We've climbed mountains, we've walked berengaroo and uh all the way out to uh Parramatta. Most people your age are retired. What keeps you going? Because I'm enjoying it.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

You know, I am probably lucky, probably, that uh uh you know I'm a little less productive than I was when I was younger. There's no doubt about it. I'm slower, I'm more distracted, but I enjoy what I'm doing. And as I'm reassured because what I'm doing now is entirely demand-driven. You know, I is it's not an organization in the US or the UN or who pay for my trip, but it's somebody who invites me. So I'm reassured that uh my mind is still working more or less, would justify the cost of my trip. So I'm enjoying it. People say, oh, you go to Australia, you should go to this beach or something. I say, well, I enjoy visiting the suburbs, uh, maybe more than staying on the beach in Australia. You know, so it's difficult for some people, you know, it's some people enjoy doing crosswords or something like that. I enjoy looking at cities. And for me, every city is different. For instance, today I was visiting some suburbs of Melbourne, and I saw a lot of things that intrigue me, which were very different from anything I know. And to me, this is uh like discovering something, a new countryside or something. But again, it's what your curiosity is. Again, maybe not very different from doing cross-words or something.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

When we were in Sydney, we gave you the option of Bondi or Paramatta, and you enthusiastically picked Parramatta. What made you want to pick that?

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Well, precisely that, because uh I have seen master plan uh of Sydney before, and uh I was intrigued and not very enthusiastic about a city which had the way I understood it, had a plan with three monocentric cities one after another. And I understood that Parametta was one of the centers which was supposed to develop. That assumed that the plan was, in fact, to fragment the labor market of Sydney into three parts, and Parameter was. So I was curious to see, you know, again, uh I think I've seen a lot of uh cities around the world for a long time, but I do not uh I I expect sometime to be surprised and possibly wrong. You know, it's the story of the black swan. You know, there could be a black one, well, the black swan was Australian. But say uh maybe Paramatta is a black swan, and I will have to reverse my opinion. Uh I still do not reverse my opinion, although I think Paramatta was relatively well designed. Again, uh sometimes those uh uh let's say uh secondary center are not very well designed to attract people. They I think it was pretty well designed, but I still think that uh the implication of fragmenting the labor market is not a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Aaron Powell Yeah, and we've we've seen this sort of in in sort of the semi-attempts at public sector decentralization. You know, Parramatta still very much has 20% office vacancies. I think Central Sydney is closer to 13%. Yes. So um, you know, very much the employment demand is still sort of focused in the center.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

And of course, again, my experience for large cities is that uh, you know, the transport from uh suburb to suburb is very important. It's uh it's growing in uh size. It's not only uh, you know, so Parramatta is a center, but say there are people who are living close to Parramatta who probably are more interested in working somewhere else. And then you should you should have transport to do that. We don't know very well how to do transport from suburb to suburbs, you know, so far. Again, uh the problem of dispersed origin and dispersed destination, we don't know how to do it.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Right. You can't run a train to every house.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yes. The Chinese are working hard on the you know, on the Pyrebald that are the Greater Bay Area to develop that on a very large area. They are succeeding in part, if they succeed entirely in making a very large labor market like that, uh they will have a productivity and innovation that we have never seen before. Because they the strangely enough, the Chinese understood, you know, the the cluster of cities happen a bit by chance, and they realized very quickly that this mix of land use, including, by the way, maintaining some industrial area within cities where the service were going was an advantage. And they let it happen. You know, they were every county uh had their own policy, and then they realized that this area were much more productive and innovative than traditional monocentric cities. And they so even sometimes I think they overdo it, because then they say, oh, well, let's just plan a multi-center. And then then the you know, the the Periba Delta was a spontaneous development. And the, of course, the advantage of a deep seaport, uh, of having uh Hong Kong next by where you had an enormous supply of very skilled people for real estate, transport, finance, uh, was an enormous advantage. But also they they had very good universities there. They developed them. I mean, the it's uh it's a very interesting experiment. I wish they succeeded, as but uh uh you know very few uh market economy, strangely enough, recognize the advantage of large cluster cities. Well, why do you think that is? You know, it's sad to say, but uh it's because of the strengths of local democracy. And uh when people live in a city which is, by the way, relative affluent, you know, I would say Sydney, uh Vancouver, uh London, San Francisco are well-managed cities, you know, in spite of some of shortcomings. Uh life is good there, especially for people who are middle income or higher, and uh and older people. And then they don't see any problem if you say we are going to increase, you know, increase the water supply, they increase supply, increase energy. It but you know, they are not against it if you say we have to build more housing. They don't want more housing in their in their neighborhood. Well, that's what EMB is all about. And so they are ready to build anything, you know, to add to anything they have for the city, but housing is too close to them, and they get what I would call the traditional word of conservative means no change. They don't want a change in their neighborhood. Now, if the majority of people want no change, the city is going to die in the long run because younger people are not going to be able, you know, they are going to have to leave the city even if they have a good job. You know, this is happening, for instance, now in Vancouver holiday. And uh so if you have a labor market which age, in the long run, uh productivity is going to go, certainly innovation going, and no new company, new firms is going to go to a city where the labor market is aging uh rather fast. If you combine that with a low fertility rate, which is again new, you know, it's recent, you know, for our country, it comes from about five, ten years ago, it started. Uh you know, all everything we know about urban economics is upside down. And the cities which can manage a you know enormous force with an influx of young people will survive the other. But my guess is that you know, on the last 30 years, a lot of cities were trying to attract jobs from big companies, Amazon or you know, uh Honda, whatever. Uh very soon, I think they will try to attract people. They will change it. So that will change, by the way, the Yimbi Nimbi dialogue. I think when they realize that uh it's going to come very soon. I have never seen it before, but I uh I don't like to project things too long because you can be wrong very often. But this is one of my predictions, is that very soon people are going to compete for people.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Rather than firms. You're not going to be subsidizing Amazon.

SPEAKER_02 12:26

You're going to be trying to introduce the kind of a man in the world. So Amazon will come to your city because there is young people who are graduated from a top university.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

And the labor force, by the way, and people who are cleaning the office also, by the way. I'm not at all thinking of uh, you know, the creative class. Uh creative class is very nice very soon, but it's, you know, you cannot have a city with just a creative class. You know, you need, uh we saw that during the COVID, what we call indispensable people were not uh Nobel Prize in Economics. They were people who load and unload trucks.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

It kind of brings us to a few of the core debates in Australian urban planning and cities discourse. Uh one one thing I want you to kind of break down there is you were talking about cluster cities. Yes. Now, one of the big popular ideas in kind of the Australian planning establishment is the idea that we might connect cities via fast trains and get those same benefits. Maybe lay out like what's what what makes a cluster city and can it be substituted by by fast trains between multiple cities? One thing which is extremely important in urban development is scale.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

You know, there's a wonderful book called Scale, done by uh the Santa Fe Institute, which are centered, I think you are. And big fan. This applies to city very much. For instance, before the development in Asia, uh in Europe we consider that, say, the Rheinstadt, you know, in Holland, you know, uh Amsterdam, Rotterdam, uh Hague, and uh Honningen, I think, uh were a cluster city, you know, linked by by train, fast train, you know, rapid train, and especially very frequent train. Now, if you look at the number of people in the Rheinstadt, if I remember well, we have something like five or six million people. It's very small by Asian standard. And it's still not quite the productivity of large clusters in Asia. You know, you have some people who are commuting from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, or it or maybe we'll go there twice a week, or you know, but it's not really a labor market. If you look at Silicon, you know, not the the Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, we have here seven million people. The Greater Bay Area in China, you know, Hong Kong uh Guangzhou, now they have 90 million people. I am not saying that, well their linkage is not very different from if you live in Marin County and you work in San Jose, you know, you know, the linkage is about the same, except that instead of linking seven million people, you link 90 million people, a population slightly larger than Germany in one uh large labor market, including manufacturing, including all conceptual things because they have fantastic universe. You know, Chinese measure uh the number of PhD per square meter. It's uh it's the only uh place where I see that way. I'm not completely sure how to measure uh you know what what it means, but they have a high number of PhD per square meter, but they have also a large number of uh uh blue worker, you know, blue-collar workers who know how to manufacture, not they are not unskilled labor who work in factories, they're very skilled labor who worked in factories, which is a slightly different thing than our traditional uh you know, blue-collar work. Again, this evolution, it's very rapid, it's very recent. For a long time, when I started my career, we were still talking about the optimum size of cities. There were sociologists who are saying above a certain density people behave uh you know antisocially. They have the exact, I'm not kidding, example of rats in the in a laboratory. If you put too many rats in a box, they start biting each other, and they thought, oh, Paris is too big, London is too big, we're too large, we have to uh so this is of course completely obsolete. Uh we have seen, we have seen Tokyo first was for a long time the largest city. I think there is no limit uh because of technology to the size of a uh again, labor market means to be able to change jobs, but also people with very different skill able to dialogue together.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

That makes sense. So you can kind of do the cluster city thing if there are genuinely enough people to cluster together such that even if they are quite dispersed or or somewhat dispersed, such that you can't reach every job within an hour.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Yeah, that's right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

Yeah. You you have probably uh you know an overlap of a large labor market. You know, if you have 90 million people, you and so that will mean 60 million people of active people, uh, you do uh so jobs, you do not have necessarily access to 60 million, but if you have access to 40 million and the other also, so you have overlapping, very large labor market, you have a productivity and innovation, which is extraordinary. And that's what the Chinese have shown us, by the way, in some fields.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Right. So when we kind of zoom this back to Australia and we think about labor markets, is it then sort of fair to say that adding more homes in in Sydney is going to be more impactful for the labor market than, say, running a fast train from Sydney to a city two hours away and hoping that the homes get built there instead? I believe so. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 18:29

Uh the you know, again, the geography of Australia is is quite different from Europe, for instance. Uh your cities are more uh more distant from each other, you're much more, you know, the expansive more. Uh and then you you have much less, I think, specialized city. Uh maybe because of this isolation, original isolation, you know, they they are parallel city in a way. So I think that uh the larger they become, and again to allow a you know contact with people with different skill. My understanding is that certainly between Sydney and and and here, uh you do not have a heavy specialization. And uh therefore uh if you have a if you had a heavy specialization, it will make sense and to link them. Uh if you do not have, I think it's an asset in a way, not to rely on two or three things. You know, for instance, at the same time uh New York was considered to be finance, uh mostly finance, and and then art to a certain extent, and then it moved a bit to movie, but then it's differentiated enormously after that. And I think it was an enormous asset, you know, rather than well, at the beginning it was even finance, insurance, and shipping. You know, the port was supposed to be the main thing, and and it differentiated enormously. Uh and uh therefore uh it in itself it grew because it differentiated, or maybe it it differentiated because it grew. I am not sure which one.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

I'm interested in the kind of specialization question. My uh editor large Menon Clifford and I kind of had a couple of blog posts back and forth around this, like because Australian cities aren't specialized. And I I raised this with um one of sort of your adjacent colleagues, Tyler Cowan, when I was over uh visiting Makatis um last year. And he sort of pointed out to me that like he's not sure that specialization is that important because even a relatively specialized city, that specialization is still a very small part of its regional product. What do you think about like kind of specialization and its advantages?

SPEAKER_02 20:53

I think that specialization existed uh certainly 100 years ago and they have uh progressively uh disappeared. But they still symbolic. You know, you link uh the movie industries to Los Angeles. Now, if you look even within the US, I think there are more movies being done outside Los Angeles, the studio of Los Angeles. A lot of it's in Vancouver. Yeah. Vancouver or in New York or Colorado or Morocco, you know, or New Zealand. Here we film a lot of it. Yeah, they there is no so you see uh this specialization disappear and in a way reinforce the potential of uh of a larger city where you have all this skill together. You know, you you have an let's say at the beginning when Shenzhen was created, they benefited enormously with uh the fast link to Hong Kong, because Hong Kong had people, for instance, in fine. And real estate, they had the skills that didn't exist at all in Shenzhen. And so for them to be at one hour trend distance from Hong Kong was an enormous advantage. I don't think this advantage exists anymore. You see, the the uh there was certainly there a complementarity, which was uh you know due to history, but uh so uh Hong Kong, you know, the the success of Hong Kong after the revol, you know, the the the communist revolution in China was that a lot of the textile industry moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong was heavily specialized in textile. Eventually they develop uh sectors, you know, financial sector and other things, and that's where Hong Kong became a really important city. It's not keeping it textile uh and and then uh linking it with a uh you know fast trend to Beijing or something like that, which make it a thing. It's uh it was really uh because this uh this you know, let's say diluted their specialization.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Right. And this is one of the things that we find when we when we look at the history of cities is that they change an awful lot.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

They change and the one what cannot change perish. Yes. My my hometown, for instance, Marseille, uh, had many uh industries which were based on the French colonies, you know, products from the French colony which were you know obtained at a discount, let's face it. Uh and the industries were owned by traditional families. When we lost our colony, uh didn't manage to change their business model. And uh Marseille is uh you know has not uh is not developing, it's uh it has you know still a very attractive site and climate, but uh it has not moved because it could not uh you know uh soap meeting, for instance, was a big thing. And uh uh and and packing uh uh tropical fruits, you know, putting them in tins that they they never change, uh the technology changed, they completely lost their so they lost their specialty, they didn't replace it by anything else. So and the cities uh you know stay at one million uh for several years, it's not growing really. Uh the port has even lost a lot of its traffic uh competing with uh Barcelona and Genoa, who are not as well located as Marseille is because we are you know with the Rhone Valley, we have direct access to the rest of Europe and Genova and Barcelona not, but they they compete very easily. So you see the uh the destiny of a city is really the ability, you know, they are exposed to external shock. You know, losing the French colony was an external shock. Uh they could they could have seen it coming, by the way. Uh and uh and when it came, they they should adapt and not just regret the good old time. Uh and uh if they adapt, they can develop very well. You know, after all, Amsterdam was also a colonial port. And uh they they did very well. So and Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. I mean, again, because they did something right.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

How do you think about this interaction? You and I have kind of talked about, you know, Mark Carney's speech, the middle powers stuff, you know, the continuation of global trade and whatnot. How do you think about the relationship between trade and labor markets? Yes, this is very important, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

And uh what bothers me a bit is that, of course, all my professional career uh took place when uh trade was increasing, you know, globalization was increasing. And I saw the enormous benefit of that. I saw it in country like Bangladesh, for us. You know, Bangladesh, when they became independent, a lot of people thought it's a country we cannot survive because of its topography, you know, constant flood, uh you know, extremely high density. At the time it was still an agricultural country. What do you do in an agricultural country where when the people are using more land than agriculture? You know, and this was a and and and water, by the way, you had constant flood and uh water, you know, the river is even changing riverbed sometimes. I mean, it was and then because of globalization, if you look at the the income of the people, the development of Bangladesh, they are doing pretty well, entirely due to globalization. You know, they adapted to globalization very quickly. Uh they realized that they had to fulfill some norms to export to Europe, to export to the US. They adapted to that very well, very quickly. They uh so you see globalization. Of course, I worked a lot in India too and in Latin America, and I saw the transform, enormous transformation, you know, the uh due to globalization. I mean billions of people literally coming out of extreme poverty that I I have seen with my own eyes, entirely due to globalization. So I cannot believe that this will suddenly stop. Even the idea that Europe or the US could live in autarky, these are 19th-century ideas which are resurrected, you know, uh mercantilism or nationalism, by the way, narrow nationalism, because where do you stop? You know, if you say uh if we have a trade deficit with Asia, that means we are being exploited by Asians. Then in New Jersey I could say, well, the New Yorker are exploiting me because uh, you know, I pay uh, you know, so why not put also a tariff on anything coming from New York? And that's the end, of course. That's why, by the way, in the American institution, you have a commerce clause. Yeah. You know, that's very important. So again, trading, I mean it comes just from classical economic, is a benefit for everybody. And uh I think it's also a factor of peace, you know, because tariff is a form of nationalism. If we are not as productive as our neighbor for something, it's because they are exploiting us. So as soon as you say that, you don't look at the way you manufacture or do things, you don't look at your comparative advantage. You know, you say just uh, you know, I have to stop those bad people from exploiting me.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

This is the end of economics. One of the things I sometimes think of, and I and I want to test whether you think this is reasonable, is that restrictive zoning sometimes feels like the equivalent of tariffs for like two straits. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Yes, yes, it is. It's a way of keeping some people away. Now, in the US, at the beginning it was purely racial. Uh now it's economics. My experience in the US now, in small town where I live, is that people do not want anybody who has a slightly higher or lower income than themselves. And therefore, one way to guarantee that is to freeze entirely land consumption and floor consumption at a certain level, which corresponds to a certain income, and to say those people are going just like us. And I will say even any additional person is a liability. You know, it's a it's Jean-Paul Sartre, uh, hell is the other. I hate to call Jean-Paul Sartre, but this time I think it applies to urban planning. You know, that considering that any additional person is going to crowd uh the highway, is going to crowd the schools, and that we are completely unable to add an extra classroom, we are completely unable to manage traffic, you know, uh or parking or something like that. Therefore, everything is frozen as it is, and any change is uh and it's easier for people who are living in a city which is pretty well managed. You know, if the city was badly managed, uh, for instance, cities which are also losing jobs all the time, then they are much less uh uh nimble. Right, because they see they see the the the danger of uh losing income and uh you know child. So so in a way it's linked, it's not by chance that the the worst, you know, the cities which are the highest price-income ratio are pretty well-managed cities like Sydney, uh, you know, New Zealand cities, Vancouver, San Francisco. They're you know, they're uh life is pretty nice there. And then people feel that any additional people could decrease the quality of life. Right. They they lost in a way their conf the confidence that the history of Australia has been to transform uh you know a continent into uh one of the major economic powers, uh still being completely outside of the traditional uh trading uh route. So that's that's an achievement of the people. You know, it was not a comparative advantage. You have a comparative disadvantage instead of trade, but by the quality of the people there, you overcame here that but so this should apply to cities. We should have confidence that we are smart enough to accommodate more people with different income or in different culture, but that you are doing that pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Yeah, we we we do a pretty good job of that. I've always uh, and I I wrote an essay, a very brief essay, uh around this when it was it was indicated that that Melbourne was gonna kind of consider a flora ratio restriction, which we don't actually have uh for the most part in our planning system. Yes, yes. Um but Sydney does. Yes. It's always struck me, you know, when you go through it, you you have the you have sort of the site coverage, yeah, um, which is the amount of land it can cover for listeners. I'm not explaining to you, Mr. Bateau. Um, but you know, the amount the amount that a site can cover, the height, and how far it's set back. Yes. And that, whether we think that is legitimate or not, you can understand the externalities that those cap onto, right? Yes. But to add floor area ratio as well has always struck me as uh an assertion by the planner that the marginal extra person is an externality. It's always felt kind of uh it's even worse.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

It's a uh it's an uh uh a marginal additional square meter of flow space for the same family, you know, which is a way of controlling income, you know, in a certain way. And uh reduce you know, the fear of the planner uh is that you may have a by law a single family house, but if you have a very large floor ratio, you may subdivide it and uh nobody will notice it. Or, you know, you you you say this my brother-in-law is living there. So that's why, for instance, uh in the town where I live, it's forbidden to have two kitchens. You can have as many bathrooms as you want, thanks God. But uh not two kitchen. You know, it would be illegal to have two kitchens. Uh so uh in uh the you know the flow ratio initially was to replace those setback and to give a certain freedom to the architect to mass, you know, to have and then if it is added to setback and height, then the result is usually that you cannot meet the flow ratio because if you have to meet all the requirements. So it means we see that in New York a lot, that in fact you have no idea because of the shape of a lot, you have no idea how many people could be there in advance. And uh so the those regulations, this consumption regulation makes absolutely no sense unless you have a reason. Uh next to heritage, you know, you have a church or some monument or government building, you want to have something low there. But you have to you have to explain it by something which is self-evident. For instance, in Paris, you have a lot of restrictions about heights, but which are purely aesthetics. So from this point, you have to see Notre Dame or you have to see the Sacré Cœur. So there is a plane, and you cannot build there so that from the sun you can still see the sun. So you can say this is very expensive, we should not do that, but at least the regulation does exactly what it says it does.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Would Paris be a richer city if it uh if it if it didn't have that restriction?

SPEAKER_02 35:49

It's uh it's difficult to know because a lot of uh the richness of city is uh precisely the you know to have a functioning city which looks like Paris at the time of Impressionist. And this mix of things is difficult to, you know, what would happen? Uh you know, if uh say Paris was looking like Le Havre, but with uh much more floor, or see, if Paris was looking like Manhattan, was will something be lost there? Uh most French will say yes, because we have so much concern about history, you know, that uh uh well be you know because France was much more powerful country 100 years ago than now, so it's uh it's a bit, but it's a real value. But so you see, uh to limit uh height and flow ratio, I can see it if you are next to an airport, you're on the fly path, you know, uh there might be some other reason, but it will have to be expressed as this is why we limit height. Uh there is no reason, for instance, limiting height because of even the width of straight doesn't make any sense. You know, most people, if you have in a very dense area, will use transit anyway. Uh you are in a country where you have plenty of sun. Uh uh, and uh, you know, even New York has much less sun than here. But look at Wall Street. So Wall Street were only office building. Now they are transforming a lot of office building uh in residential. So in streets, which sometimes are 15-20 meters wide, no more than that. And the the real estate prices are extremely high. So that means that this so-called negative externality of not having Dyke's sun on your window is not recognized by the people living there. So they take their sun somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Yeah, I've always thought that like the best example on the sun thing is, you know, a very high amenity, relatively well, quite expensive place like Iceland, where you only get the sun half the year. Yes. Those people are not, I think, particularly dysfunctional.

SPEAKER_02 38:14

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah, they're not lying.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so this sun is a it's a myth, you know. I think in the time, you know, uh during the industrial revolution in the northern Europe, uh, if you didn't have, you know, you have to rely on natural ventilation, and it's humid, so that means in winter you will have probably a lot of mold, uh, humid. You have uh five people per room, one of them will have tuberculosis. So certainly not to have sun and ventilation and heat in in, you know, people were relying on the heat of the sun to dry and also in winter for heating. So uh that was really a serious consideration for the reformists. You know, that's why you had Garden City, which was entirely. But after that, we keep talking about the sun because it's our tradition. And I saw that in China because it's scientific. You know, uh the height of the sun at a certain latitude is a scientific fact. You can calculate exactly the angle. And it appears that then your zoning is scientific. You say we we want one hour of sun for the uh, you know, the Chinese still have that actually for every apartment. So you add the solstice, the winter solstice, you calculate the angle. Yeah, we have the same thing. And that gives the distance between buildings. So that's convenient because you don't have to rely on uh on the market to define the price of land, and uh, but it's completely absurd. It's a it's a bit the same as you were saying uh any latitude which is a pair number or you know, a an even number or odd number will have a different height. You know, this will be scientific because you can calculate latitude, but it it's absurd.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Right, it's an arbitrary scientifically derived.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Or people were named. It's completely arbitrary. It's scientific. Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

You can build a system if it's not underpinned by some fundamental reasons. Some fundamental reasons itself. You've talked there a bit kind of about how our needs on housing and the rules of thumbs of planners that have been passed down. They haven't really kept up with technology necessarily. But you've also described yourself to me multiple times as a 19th century guy. And yet you, throughout your career, have kind of embraced technology a lot. Yes. What what is it that's kind of attracted you there and and and what what have you gained from using technology at the cutting edge throughout, you know, 60 years of planning?

SPEAKER_02 40:55

Uh, you know, when I started planning, uh in order to have an updated map of the extension of a city, including by the way, the suburbs of Paris, you had to get surveyors to survey it, and you have to update the map. And uh and sometimes it was difficult to get. So you had an idea about density. Uh traffic was even worse, you know. We will make, in order to understand traffic, for instance, between the suburbs of Paris and Paris, something like that, we had we will put a little uh pneumatic thing in the road to count trucks, and but you know, it was two wheels depending. I mean, it was rather, you know, it was there, you know, we derive in number of trips, we didn't know exactly where those trips were going. They just passed this thing. We did a number of surveys where we will ask, we give a questionnaire to people saying, uh, how long do you commute so that people estimate or misestimate? Say, where do you work, where do you live? We didn't have uh uh uh GIS, therefore to calculate the distance, we have to go by and you know, somebody give you, it's difficult for now for people if you give you one address where you live, one address where you work, it's very easy now to get a real distance. At the time, you would have to ask somebody to measure on a map what it was. You know, I to measure an area, I I had a little gizmo called a planimeter, which was a mechanical thing. And for instance, I used to measure a census track to calculate the density within each census track. You have to measure physically on a map uh the with, again, a mechanical thing. When you add all the census track that you have measured, uh, and you measure the the entire year, of course, you will not get the right the same result. So you'll have to adjust it. Uh, it was extremely boring. So you will you know you will subcontract to a young student will be even more bored than you because you knew at you knew at least that the result would be interesting, but the student has absolutely no skin in the name the game. So, you know, everything we did, that's why I think planners were more quantitative than uh qualitative than quantitative, because to be quantitative was so boring and difficult. And then suddenly when we start having uh first satellite imagery, we could um the first time I used one was yes, it was in a meta bug. I was working on a project, and my colleagues were developing a uh issues system and financing a sewer system. And uh as I do, I usually I will walk around Amelabad on foot. And when I look at the map of their sewer system, I told them, but you are missing half of the city because they were putting their sewer only within the municipal boundary. But I knew that there were high density outside the municipal boundary, many of them informal, by the way, but a lot of people. And if you make a sewer, you have to take account not only the people you project will be there, but the people were already there. You had better take them into account. And they were completely surprised because the municipality gave them only the number of people within the municipality, and it stopped at the municipal boundary. So suddenly we ordered a, I remember it was a Landsat imagery with a hundred-meter resolution, which is not very good for urban. You know, now we have we have 40 centimeter, even 20 centimeter resolution. But we you could see that the built-up area of the city, you couldn't see what it was, but you know, so then it completely changed the way we we designed things, you know. The fact that we understood better, maybe also uh it was easier to understand affordability problem in those countries because you realize that most people could not afford housing and then lived in uh informal settlement, which completely escape the statistic of the city. You know, it now, at least when we, you know, in Mumbai, every year they tell you what population living in slums, you know, in uh informal settlement. They monitor it because we measure them on satellite imagery. Imagine that if you cannot measure it, you tend to completely ignore those people.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Right. And you've said that sort of planners often think that people disappear.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Yeah, disappear, yeah, yeah. That, or you know, if they yeah, they what struck me uh in even other countries, uh I remember in El Salvador, they developed a new master plan and what they uh they thought was very accurate, you know, for every lot, you know, if you have air one, air two, air three, uh, you had the minimum lot size, every area was covered uh by those uh zones. If you took the price of land and the price of infrastructure, you could very easily for each R1, R2 R3 zone of each part of the city, say, if your income is less than that, you cannot live there. When you add all this zone together, you'll find that about 50% of the people who live and work in inside, they were not beggars, they were people already living, were working there, uh, could not afford any housing. You know, 50% of the housing of the master plan will not be affordable.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

So a a planner might say, well, the the solution to this, let's say we we think Mumbai is as it is, uh, might be, and again, this goes back to the decentralization question that comes here. And I just want to flesh it out a little bit. Yes. They'll say that, well, the answer is, you know, you can build another Mumbai 50, 100 kilometers away, and then we can the people in the slums will naturally relocate there. Would that happen? Would that work?

SPEAKER_02 47:24

Of course not. If the people came to Mumbai and live in Islam, which is not fun at all, it's because of the labor market of Mumbai. You know, for us, we you know, we live in good conditions. Uh, even an urban planner in Mumbai lives in good conditions. So you leave those, you see those people living in pretty terrible conditions of hygiene, you know, dirty streets, uh open shore. And uh you have to think that those people choose to live there. They could live in their village under a beautiful mongo tree, and they selected to go there. Especially in the 20th century uh uh transport became relatively cheap. That means that those people who immigrated to Islam in Mumbai or El Salvador could go back to their village. They could afford to go back. It's not that they were stuck there, and they decide to stay there. That means something very powerful while attracting them. They had hope that at least their children will be better than they are, because the city provides employment opportunity, education opportunity, and strangely enough, even health opportunity, somebody living in Islam and Mumbai, their kids has much less uh much more chance of survival than living in what appears very healthy, you know, under a mango tree in a village. So we have to recognize that even poor people, possibly even illiterate, have some knowledge that we planners do not have. You know, they are betting their own life on it. We are only betting on the color of a plan and that it's right or not right. So for us, it's arbitrary, it's a game. For them, it's a life or death thing. So we have to understand that their motivation is powerful, and that's why I insist that a city is a labor market. People go to a city because of the quality of people who live there. That means that if somebody is illiterate in a village, or let's say basic education, let's say, you know, it has an enormous advantage to move to a city which has very highly educated people. Uh and there is a chance that their children will be also highly educated. If they stay in their village in this small town, their children will be exactly them. Uh even if the state makes an effort to have good local schools, it's really the contact between educated and not educated. You know, there are a lot of people who are self-educated. They are self-educated because they are in contact with educated people. You don't self-educate if nobody is educated. You know, you self-educate because you have access to other people.

SPEAKER_01 50:25

That's right. Yeah, we at Infortune Points published an article from uh Katie Roberts Hull in our first issue, which was exactly on this that you know mixed income, mixed socioeconomic schools are very, very good for poorer students, with I think practically no negative impact on wealthier students. That's right, yeah. Um, because it's yeah, the it it brings people up.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

Uh I would say, you know, I I in Marseille, I was uh in a state school, and in Marseille, uh there are neighborhoods, you know, with huge difference of income, not very far from each other. It's not that the east side is for each other, it's uh it's neighborhood, you know. And so at school I was, you know, my parents were relatively you know well off, but I was with uh kids who were much lower, and for me it was a very good education too, you know, and and understanding things. And uh and also by the way, that some were very attractive in spite of speaking French a little more kind of uh vernacular than mine.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

Yeah. And and yeah, I think of it like tennis, boxing, chess, you know, things that you really only get better at if you're sparring with someone who's who's who's better than you. Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah. Let's say uh that there are planners listening to this who feel kind of constrained by the current norms of the profession and they want to make our cities better, they they buy the labor market argument. What should they be looking at as metrics both that they control, but also metrics that that they should should be measuring as like high level?

SPEAKER_02 52:11

There is a problem of the inner city. That means the way the inner city develops, you know, uh transform itself. I think you are not doing too badly there, except maybe from some um heritage thing that could be probably revised. But except for that, I think in the inner city, you are you are, you know, I'm struck in Melbourne to learn that many of those skyscrapers were developed recently, for instance. So that means that you are adapt to adjust, you know, you adapt rather rapidly. Development in the suburb is different. And I think that here uh you have to count the the real consumption of land per square meter built. And this consumption, I it's not only the lot size, it's how much a developer has to acquire uh, or the state has to acquire to develop a new city, how much land to produce one square meter of floor space. And I have the feeling here, because of the different level of government or authority, you know, planners, uh each one adds some requirement of land use, which is certainly directly reflected in the price of square meter floor space, but is not explicitly. You know, what you buy is a lot. And you say, okay, my lot is this, my uh my floor space is this, my the price of my house is this. But in fact, how much of it, you know, the important in uh there are some planners now who are uh measuring the gross floor ratio, that means the flow ratio on a square kilometer, taking into account all the constraints that you have, you know, uh green space, uh, if you have to live uh, you know, basically how much land you consume to build one square meter of case. And suddenly they discover a lot of things that they didn't know. As a rule of thumb, I will say that any time uh to build one square meter of floor space, you need uh more than another square meter of length. Uh you probably uh are in misallocating length. But again, it's a rule of thumb. You should measure it. And you should see, you know, it's so tempting for various levels of planners to say, why don't you add a buffer there? Why don't you uh well, uh, you know, it would be nice if you have a car we can park on both sides of the street, and then uh a truck there, and then a fire truck will have to uh be able to pass even if a truck is part of. I mean, uh you could say, oh, well, that's a good idea, but each time you add more land, and uh more land means not only that somebody has to pay for this land, but it means that you had to go further away to get this land. And at the time it will be paid in transport. Uh what strikes me uh in Melbourne, you know, this visit, you know, it's it's a very recent knowledge I've acquired here uh just this morning, is that uh it's it looks like a finger development. And I think it's uh it's deliberate.

SPEAKER_01 55:39

Uh right, with the green wedge there in the city.

SPEAKER_02 55:41

Yeah, the wedge, yeah. You don't call it a green belt, you can do it a wedge. That means you separate your separate development. And you know, in an abstract way, it sounds good. I mean, the the uh people in Copenhagen brag about it. I think it's a terrible idea. Uh I think uh uh open space are required and very nice, but they should be accessible and usable. You know, a field, an open field between two uh, you know, two, you know, I mean a wedge is not recreation. Uh recreation is something which is well designed and uh or it's linear, so you can uh jog or bicycle for 20 kilometers, but it's not uh it's not a field, an open field, it's not recreation.

SPEAKER_01 56:30

The argument for it, I think, is is less for human use, but I think comes from kind of an argument of maintaining biodiversity.

SPEAKER_02 56:39

Oh you know, I don't know how is your agriculture here, but a lot of people found that there is no more biodiversity in suburbs than uh in modern agriculture, in Europe at least. You have much more uh chemical put uh you know uh in in fields. You have also monoculture, you know, if you you cultivate corn or wheat or uh uh or even uh you know uh wine, uh I mean the grapes. You know, monoculture and most agriculture is becoming monoculture. It's very rare that you have a small field of potatoes and another field of uh uh you know uh wheat and uh and you go almonds or something like that. So uh this biodiversity, I've you know in in my own suburbs uh of New Jersey, I I would be pretty certain that uh we have much more biodiversity than in a wheat field in Kansas. So I think we I agree with biodiversity, but I I will not put you know non-urban land necessarily as equivalent to biodiversity. Right. It will uh it will have to be studied before you do that.

SPEAKER_01 58:09

Right. And it could be, for instance, that maintaining, say, some portion of this land purposefully and like as an arboretum or what have you.

SPEAKER_02 58:18

For instance, say, again, I I don't want to put my suburb in New Jersey in exactly. But uh we have a little river coming from the apparition, and we have about a buffer along two sides of the river to prevent flooding, by the way, about 200 meters. And there anything grows. You know, the forest, it's uh uh the trees died there, you have plenty of insects going in the dead trees. We have an enormous number of bird species. We have a lot of rodents, some difficulty identifying. Uh, sometimes we have a black burr. You imagine we are 25 kilometers from Manhattan, we have black bear descending. I'm not saying that it's every day. I'm not saying it's a good thing to have a black bear in your neighborhood, but uh, you know, it shows that these black bear are finding food on the river. Uh, they are trout, by the way, in the river. Uh, you know, these little rivers so close to Manhattan. So I think that uh uh we should be very active of biodiversity. We should certainly ban uh insecticide in suburbs. You know, uh one thing the Americans are terrible with is that we have a loan in front of our house, and they are constantly a company will say, we are going to kill all the ants and the and the flies, and the and that's of course a terrible thing. You know, there's no reason we should uh uh if we have a front loan, we should uh grow anything, you know, uh, you know, grass, only grass is not a good idea. So again, biodiversity should be an objective. I'm pretty sure that you can get it even in cities. You know, sometimes we have observed eagles in Manhattan. You know, we're living in Central Park, and sometimes they hunt in Central Park, but they nest on the top of skyscraper.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:12

An urbanist eagle.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

An urbanist eagle. So I think that, you know, again, uh, this wedge thing uh come with an objective which is only vaguely, nobody measures it really.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:24

You know, you assume that if it's not built, then you will have a lot of uh butterflies, you'll have caterpillars, you'll have foxes.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:33

Might not be true. I um I read an essay a long time ago, I don't know where, um, that sort of tried to make the case that the space between the railway tracks and the fence around the rail tracks is one of the last areas of wilderness in the city. Because you won't go there, I won't go there, maybe the maintenance man goes there once a year. Yeah. But generally speaking, the animals they are completely free.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Yes. They will not, yes, that's a yeah. That's so I think biodiversity should be studied very carefully. And I'm sure you could have, again, little corridors who are not a wedge like here with a 20 kilometers, but say maybe maybe a kilometer, maybe 500 meters, I don't know. And then it will be really protected. Uh for instance, the tree will be let to fall and rot there, possible, rather than being you know, manicured, then, you know, then you will have a lot of insects and bird eating the insects. I mean, again, I'm not, it's not my field, but uh you see, this is the problem with those regulations which come from something, you know, when you are concerned about the sun for your children, you know, if the the street is too narrow, they will have no sun. It's a goodwill, you know, you're trying to do well, but it's based on the medieval prejudice. And we have to be serious about it, not to rely on the a vague uh virtuous concept.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:08

This kind of brings me to kind of a pretty important piece. And a large part of why we brought you out here is to very much kind of speak, I think, to the economists of Australia, the planning establishment here. You've obviously uh, you know, you've had a career, you discovered economics. You wrote sort of in in order without design, you write that, you know, uh maybe the reader thinks I'm ignorant because I didn't know. Actually, it was it was like pretty standard for planners. And in my experience, it kind of still is. There's there's an ignorance of markets and even often a hostility. Yes. Why does the profession have a have such a blind spot? And why are you one of the kind of few who's been able to overcome it? Why haven't other people kind of come to this this realization? Or have they and they just haven't written?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:59

For me, I think uh the big challenge where when I went in Shandigar to work in Srandigarh, I had a great admiration. This is in India. In India. And uh, you know, Corbusier was building that, and I had a great admiration for Corbusier, mostly now I realize because the style of writing French is very powerful. So it was more a literary way that but anyway, and I if I had just visited Shendigar as a tourist, I would have probably come back saying this is a great thing. It happened that I found a job as a draftman at the planning office, but the fact that I was working there, I was, you know, I was a I was with my colleagues at the office after work. We were looking for a place to have a drink. I mean, uh it was a dry city, dry state uh at the time. And uh uh and and then I had to get new clothes, and of course I had to buy food, and I found that uh in the illegal settlement where most of the workers were building shenigar were living, these were the most active part of the city. The shops which were planned by Corbusier had nothing really interesting to sell. They were what the Indian call government emporium. And uh uh and so this spontaneous aspect uh of planning, I discovered because I was, in a way, living in a poor country too. The you know the spontaneous aspect is more visible in a developing country, in a poor country than in a rich one. In a rich one, people will be hidden in uh public housing or shelter for homeless or something like that. And so I realized that uh uh, you know, and those people were driven there by economics. It's not that they didn't like a large house, it's because we established standards that they could not afford. So, in a way, that's the way I discovered uh economics that way. And then I realized that this, you know, the economics constraint that was were imposed on the workers of Chandigar were in fact similar in Paris, but it was not as visible. Uh or you know, people were living in the east side of Paris, where I will never go anyway. Uh, you know, I was living in the Latin quarter. So, but they were there too. You know, the problem was exactly the same. So uh but then it's not quite the answer to your question. Your question is why this dichotomy between uh economists and urbanists? I think that most of the profession of planners come normally from either architects like me or engineers. And We are trained, we are told instead of being craftsmen, we have for architects we think we are artists. For engineers, they think that they are inventors, you know. They are uh, you know, a big uh, you know, they would like to be Edison or or or FL maybe or something. And so they want to design something, uh, architects of and they design surregulation. And they feel they are working with developers and architects working for developers, and they know that developer will not build a building if they know they are going to lose money and go bankrupt, obviously. And for some reason, they feel because themselves, as they are, you know, they have no skin in the game, and when they color a mat, that they are more virtuous because they don't get money. Whether the thing goes bankrupt or not, they are neutral. And they think that just by virtue of not having an interest in it, they necessarily defend uh the public interest. You know, we go back again. Sorry, I'm getting a little maybe only tangent.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:18

No, this is very good.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:20

But between you know, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Adam Smith thinks that within if you follow some rules of human behavior, serving your own interest could benefit everybody. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau says very clearly in the Contrast Social that uh private interests are necessarily antagonistic to public interest. And therefore, as a group, you have somebody who represents public interest, and that should uh constrain the accomplishment of private interest. So, therefore, if a developer makes a profit as a civil servant, you have to make sure that you minimize it at a you know, and you'll be so in a way you prefer that the government subsidize housing, or even so then that will be a sign of virtue that uh you know the price of housing has nothing to do with its cost. Uh and it's a sign of virtue. And by the way, it's not a conspiracy. People are really convinced of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:42

You know, and on the other hand, if you have land use regulation which are so drastic that you cannot build anything legally without being bankrupt, or you have a very, very narrow market of extremely rich people who are richer, then the profession is tempted to cut corners or to do or to bribe even. It becomes a bit during prohibition, you know. In a country without prohibition, selling beer is a completely normal job and completely honorable job. Uh, if you forbid to sell alcohol for a profit, uh it becomes the job for criminals. You know, I saw that in India, for instance, at the same time, one of my Indian colleagues said that uh the land use regulation in India has criminalized the entire sector of real estate. You know, you cannot be a real estate developer without having bribed an official. Because if not, you will not survive.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:49

Yeah. Melbourne um has had sort of those a big thing called Operation Sandon, which was a way uh which had to do with actually the greenfield suburb developments where there were literal sacks of cash, like briefcases of cash being traded at cafes uh to counselors, right? Because it was so hard to get projects over the line. And I heard from one of the developers that ironically, the sort of suspension of the counselors after the bribes actually like removed a whole bunch of frictions and working with with just the officers was actually a lot easier. So, in a way, getting punished for the bribes actually sort of helped the sector a little bit. Yes, yes. Why hasn't there, though, been more scrutiny? It's sort of only after sort of 2000s, Ed Glazer's kind of work coming onto the scene where there's been more scrutiny on this. And I I mean I think it's arguable that that planning restrictions is the biggest policy failure globally of the last 70 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:51

Uh my guess, and again, it's just observation by one person, is that uh you find people like Ed Glazer who are working for a university, he works a lot as a consultant. I don't think he has ever worked directly with a mayor at the time when a mayor is like in New York now, contemplating to rest, you know, reinforce rent control. I don't think any economist is working there. And so economists, you know, again, the uh Glazor is particularly effective in urban planning because it communicates extremely well and outside also of academic papers, so that's very effective. But in general, economists, you know, when they see rent control or they see minimum lot size, which are completely or floor ratio, which are completely detrimental to the supply of housing, they will write, they will analyze it very, you know, mathematically, write a paper in a journal, other economists will say, this is great, you get a fantastic job. How many mayors read uh you know peer-reviewed economic papers? Even to read them, they will have a background in mathematics, which it's very rare. And why is it that municipalities employ engineers, planners, architects, lawyers, but never employ really economists? Or maybe if they employ economists, there will be somebody who would say rent control is wonderful, or you know, you know, it could be true. Uh I don't know. But uh they will have to do that. In Vancouver now, they are trying to introduce a bill which says that anybody who decides about land use regulation for the city should have a background, some background in economics. Uh, you know, we have for some basic, you know, economics 101 about supply and demand and something like that. I don't know if this is enforceable, this is applicable, you know, but we have to consider that it's not dirty to consider the price of housing resulting from uh regulation. You know, regulations are in effect forcing an amount of consumption of land and floor space and infrastructure without understanding its price, its cost, and without understanding what is the income of the people on the other side, you know, who are going to buy it. We have to link those two. Exactly like uh anybody who is selling something. Even a doctor. Yeah, even a doctor have to consider, well, certainly the insurance company, you know, whether it's government or, you know, has to consider the the price of medication and things like that, you know. So this has to be a reform. And and this idea that planners who have no skin in the game and no understanding of price, and even consider that that to consider price is dirty, especially for the environment. I had a very good friend who had very interested in the environment, and for several years we worked together. And when I mentioned the cost of certain regulation, Isaiah, you deceive me. You are talking dollars. I'm talking about life. Yeah. And there's no such thing as the economy. I mean, a poor person is very concerned about dollars.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:38

Very concerned.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:38

Much more than your when they have the skin in the game. Yeah, we we can make a lot of trade-off between planting trees and things like that or doing other things. But poor people do not make, you know, they have to work hard for uh most of the time. They cannot divert any of their uh income to you know something.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:56

So there are skills and technologies, and you know, we can think of skills as technologies often, particularly in professions. That permeate through, right? Doctors become better at eye surgeries, you know, we we we gain these these skills. And as we talked about sort of earlier, there's been a large uh progression in technology, in urban planning, our ability to spatialize things, to build digital twins, those sorts of things. Right. But they haven't permeated the professional practice yet. Yes. What is the best way to do that? Is it is it redesigning sort of the planning schools? Is it building better curriculums? How do you how do you get it in?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:38

I had an illustration of that when you know the the seven years, six years when when I was teaching a class at NYU. My best students were coming from a newly created uh uh department at NYU, which was created by uh Mayor Bloomberg. When Mayor Bloomberg were mayor, uh he was asked to take decisions on land using. And immediately he would say, Where is the data? And people say, Well, mayor decide this thing, you know. They constantly everything was political. And he says, No, no, no, we we we have ways to know better now, you know, again, what's the implication of housing price, of uh changing the forest or something like that. And so people told him, we don't have any data. So he had, of course, to take decisions as a mayor, you can't. But he created this department. My best students were coming from this department. However, uh during the class, he came to me and said, Ah, this is wonderful, because we know how to extract a lot of data from the city, you know, from transport, from telephone, from uh measuring the consumption of water in office building. We extract, you know, we we understand a lot of what, but we never learn about what is objective. What will you do with it? Right. We we work on so again here, this is a beauty of a city. I wish when I was younger, as a planner, when I was working in the department, New York Department of City Planning, you know, in the 80s, in the eight or sixties, sorry. Uh that I had people like that with me because I was guessing. You know, and uh so again, in a big city, uh you could have somebody who understands how a city work, uh, and another one with a bit, I would say, like an well, an accountant for, you know, and we can measure uh how, for instance, trips change uh between COVID, before COVID, after COVID, during COVID, will monitor that and tell you, ah, this is a trend now. Uh how many of, you know, after COVID, how many people go back to office? What is the size of office which is rented? This is very important for us to understand. And uh those people know how to measure that in real time. You know, the important uh most urban planners work in this 10-year master plan where you basically you have consultants design doing a blueprint for during one or two years, they you know, they spend millions of dollars doing this blueprint, then they walk away. And you have a department of urban planning who is trained only to enforce land use regulation without understanding what is the impact of that. What we need is an urban planning department, which has planners, I think with my background, or engineering or lawyers, but they work side by side with people who know how to extract data. And they can direct them and say, this is very important if we get it. And those people they have a skill. I I don't, you know, I cannot acquire the skill to do that. It's very complicated. You have to know a lot of things. But, you know, it's a bit like uh at the end of the 19th century, architects were obliged to work with structural engineers, and they were not used to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:22

Many architects still are not used to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:24

Yeah, uh well, uh yes. But I remember the the Grand Palais in Paris was, you know, the structure of the roof was done by an engineer, but the walls by an architect, and they refused to meet each other during the whole construction. But say, normally many architects now use uh structural engineers, well, at least for skyscrapers, you know, and they work together, and we we understand that these are complementary, you know, it's not that you compete. And I think that's for urban planners it should be the same thing. And uh mayors, I mean, whoever decides what is a staffing of a planning department, I assume it's a mayor or the, I don't know who decide that. Uh uh, should be, you know, they should be sure that they have the skills in the same way as if you are a private firm, you want a financial analyst, you want an engineer, you know, depending on what you do, you want somebody who does marketing. You know, those are different skills which are absolutely necessary. And I think that uh they have to differentiate the skill so that affordability and again the understanding what a labor market is, that means the time of transport. You know, if you are in a suburb, how long does it take? You know, how many how many jobs you reach with a car and how many jobs do you reach with the public transport? You should monitor that all the time. Although you don't know where the people are working, it doesn't matter. They must have a choice. And so if you understand that, that the fact that they're employed is not enough, you have to know how the city is evolving and have some people who monitor that, that will help you take much better decision.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:08

Right, because as you've sort of said, the advantage of a labor market is not that everyone has a job, it's that they have the counterfactual access to other jobs.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:18

To other jobs during our, especially now, technology change. Uh people, you know, you get out of college, most people uh don't exactly know what they want to do. So they get a job, which is a good thing because they learn, but then suddenly they realize that they are good at something and not at others. And by the way, this diversity also of skills uh is absolutely indispensable in this city. You need people who are not innovative at all, who are very rigorous in applying rules, and you need other people who are ready to break the rule and say, hey, maybe if the rule were different, you would do. And but those two should coexist. You know, it's not you cannot have people who like breaking rules. You know, again, imagine a bookkeeper who likes breaking rules, it will not be very good. You know, uh an imaginative uh bookkeeper is not good for a firm in the long run. So, but other people have to. So again, this mix of uh of talent uh is absolutely and yeah, university do not necessarily does a first triage, but not complete one. And we change as we age too.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:31

Yes. Going back to the skin of the game, I want to test a kind of idea with you. I think of something like marketing and advertising, which has evolved drastically over the last 20 years as data availability comes up. You know, the the magic of the phone and of screens is that for the first time we actually know how many ads you tend to be looking at. And so there's a lot of data in that industry very quickly, and you are much better paid, have access to much better jobs if you are able to access that data, because generally speaking, you'll be able to get more profit. Definitely. You've often said on on this tool when we've been having conversations that a lot of the technological tools and whatnot that either you you pioneered, invented, or um, you know, began using were taken up much more by developers than planners. Is there an element that kind of the stasis of the industry is because it's very hard to incentivize them to have skin in the game to learn new skills?

SPEAKER_02 1:23:32

Maybe because the targets are not well established.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:37

If you have a, let's say what you have an affordability problem, you know, you have very high price income ratio. If uh if the mayor or the city council or whoever is in, you know, state maybe is in charge of the policy, and they say, well, if people cannot afford housing, uh why you know uh why don't we subsidize it? So then you start putting the wrong incentive there. And nobody when you say subsidizing, you you solve an immediate problem, you know, you will have the people who benefit from the subsidy, suddenly will be able to afford nice housing, but you don't solve the problem. And I think that here probably you will have to give the right incentive saying your job as urban planner, although you work for the government, is to make sure that if you are at this percentile of the income scale, uh you don't pay more than 30% of your income. Therefore, we should be able to develop houses which do not sell at more than so many dollars per square meter. And those houses should not be somewhere where land is very cheap, so that, but they should access 60% of the job in less than an hour. You know, some incentive like that which will be quantified and say this is the objective now. Will that make a good political platform? It's a little complicated, but say I will say it's a bit the same as if you have an investor in your firm, you don't describe what you will do to manage the financial viability of the firm, you just give results. Yeah. And I think that in this case, uh, probably the planning department or the the, you know, because it's it's linked also to transport, land use and transport are very, very much linked together. You know, again, this policy of uh uh getting further away along fingers means that you go further away. That means your transport system will have been faster, maybe reorganized different ways in order to access. So uh you have to have a team which is much more pluridisciplinary, including the planners, are part of the team. They are not a separate department. And the objective is not to develop land or to have even, ah, we we plan uh in 20 years to have a uh you know a potential of uh 50,000 new dwelling units or 100,000. It is you know the the word affordability has to get back to its original meaning. That means we want a school teacher to be able to access, to have access to a house and he will have you know, he will spend less than 30 minutes to get to his school, wherever his house is. That's objective. If you formulate it that way, rather than we have to build uh 200,000 units within five years, that will be much worse. You know, you have to to target it.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:06

But then when you when you set that target, a lot of uh politicians and departments uh then go to the subsidy route.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:15

Aaron Powell Yes, because uh let's say politically uh you can give the subsidy right away. And you cut the ribbon the next year on 200 houses which are subsidized, which is very nice. And uh that's uh that's a bit, you know, again, one of the problems. Again, that's the problem of housing I was talking about before, that people everybody's for more housing, not close to their house. Uh, every politician is for affordable housing, providing you provide it within three or four years, or even less, I suppose. Less. So so and uh housing policy has to be uh you know has to be followed. By government, whatever the party, this is uh the well, that's what worked, I think, relatively well in New Zealand. That you had, in fact, uh, you know, the National and the Labour Party uh more or less followed about the same policy, although with slight differences. And uh that's only way, you know, you cannot solve an affordability problem as you have it now uh in four years.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:28

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:29

And that's with our type of policy, how do you do that? I'm not sure. You know, again, uh that's uh that's something, by the way, which is missing on my book, but I think my book is long enough. Uh, that uh the political, you know, I never talk about the political side. However, I think I still say, and but I repeat in all my lectures, that do not think that a technician like me, a technocrat, can replace a politician. You know, the priority of a city, uh, a large city, complex city like Melbourne or Sydney, has to the priorities have to be established politically. Only a politician can do that. Politicians provide uh you know priorities, thing our priorities, you know, they allocate the budget. So they say 20% for the environment, 30% for uh urban development, and something like that. This is political. There is no formula which says the optimum budget will allocate 20% for uh land development and 10% for education. It's not, it's political. So we have to accept that. Our jobs as technocrats is to say if your goal is to make housing affordable to a school teacher, uh, this is the 100 steps, by the way, that you have to take.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:51

And this is kind of where the Yimbi movement sits, sort of rather than as an extension of Order Without Design, which I don't think it is, though Order Without Design is regularly referenced by myself and our members. The Yimbi movement is the political kind of start to this, right? It's balancing out that I think we both agree the human nature that that drives the kind of NIMBYism, the fear of change, the assumption that change is loss.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:22

Yeah, you don't you don't solve the housing problem with an equation. Although equation might be very useful to find the tool to solve that. But say a black box has never solved any problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:36

That's right. I think of it as, you know, the Yimbi movement sort of gets us in the doors. And then when we're being listened to, and the planners say, and the government says, and the politicians say, well, okay, what are we what should we use? How do we how do we do the thing that we're convinced? And that's when I think we hand them order without design.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:58

Uh in India, you know, where I worked a lot, uh the people who were more, I think, influential in uh reforming. I mean, there's still a long way to go, but they have reformed a lot. Their planning system is a press, the free press of India. They some newspaper even dedicated every week a page entirely to housing issues, the type of thing you discuss, you know. They so uh and uh they will even organize conference. Sometime even they brought me from the United States to discuss with politicians and technocrats, all they're you know, saying, well, what is the advantage of doing that and that? So the press has a very and again uh the press could be also uh uh you know simplifying so much, but uh if they are you know, there are now uh uh reporters which are called quantitative reporters. And and those are usually pretty good, they analyze. Uh you know, I'm I'm very grateful to them because they are the uh the transmission will, you know. Um you know, we we can't say we we are a little computer on the side, we planners or technocrats, and we have to transmit that into action. You know, a computer do not have action, you know, and and so there are a number of people, organizations like yours, the press, uh is carrying those ideas, and then they are aware of the uh the constraint that a politician is is facing. So not to advocate something which is too fast or maybe ideal, but will not give any results sometime, you know. In a way, I saw that when I was working in Russia and China. The problem, you know, they want they both wanted to reform, become a market economy at the time we started. And the question was not to know what Russia will be like when they have a market economy. The question is to know, right now we have a uh centrally planned economy and we want to move, but what should we do in the next six months? And that is much more difficult, and only the local people can decide that. You know, you can, you know, given the skill that they have, the constraint of the people. So that's it's a mix of technology and politics. And that's uh the role of uh you know organizations like yours, I think, which are again this this belt of transmission from ideas to reality on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:38

All right. So I promised uh our Sydney audience that I would answer some of their over a hundred questions that they sent up to the panel. Some of them were for Lucy Turnbull. Yes, yes. But some some were for you. We've talked sort of around decentralization. There were a few questions around that. But another obsession of the Australian legacy planning establishment is a couple of international cities. So Vienna with its high amounts of non-market housing and Singapore with sort of 80% of its land being state-owned, right? I guess are these viable models for our future? Can you kind of demystify them a little bit to people who sort of hear them and think it sounds like a pretty good idea? Let's start with Vienna.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:20

So Vienna, I never worked in Vienna, but I visited it many times, and I greatly like it, of course, because I visit museums, I go to concerts, I walk around, and it's a wonderful city. It's not very large. What strikes me is that uh it's often, by the way, uh on the list of the most desirable city, at least in Europe, but even worldwide, it comes in the first fifth, I think, of most desirable city. By the way, most uh Australian cities also make it uh at the top of the list. Melbourne is often number one. Number one, huh? Yes, yes. So if it is such an exceptional city for housing, uh Vienna is right in the center of Europe where people are able to move, you know, work around. Why the population is not growing very fast? You know, why uh you know affordable housing plus extremely desirable culturally, you know, a lot of amenities, great restaurants, great cakes also. Uh why that? I don't know. But uh to me, a city which is growing uh, you know, is a symbol, you know, is a symbol that people want to go there. Now, sometimes it's not necessarily because life is fun, but again, it's a labor market, you know, that you can get a good job and that your children will be better off if you move to the city. So why people are not uh moving to Vienna, I don't know. Singapore I know it's much better because uh uh although I never worked for Singapore, but I work in Singapore and I know a lot of people who are working in the administration of Singapore, who communicated all things. Uh first it has a unique history. Yes. Uh yeah, no, it's a city-state. In terms of land use, there was always a threat, like Hong Kong, that uh they will not have water. You know, they depend on what from Malaysia for water. So they had to keep a large amount of land, not to provide water all their life, but in case the water was cut, that they will have, I forgot exactly what it was, but something like 10 days before they have to bring tankers of water. And that was their security blanket, let's say. So it's clear that if this is the case, you have a finite amount of land, or quasi-finite, because they, by the way, they did a lot of landfill too. I think they increased by 30% the natural, you know. But that's again due to topography. I mean, it's something they could do. So in this case, you have to ration land use. You know, it's a bit like during the war, when you have a finite, you cannot increase supply at all. You know, they have a double constraint, being a small island, very successful economically, but and at the same time having to keep a large amount of land as a catchment area for water. So one thing they did was wonderful was they recycle even sewer water. And I think every year there is a I think there is a water minister who drink on television the water coming from a recycle sewer water. So they have a constraint and they manage this constraint extremely well. The system now, I think, is creaking a bit because being very small, being a city-state is a big advantage. However, when you have again those very specialized jobs that you need at especially at the high level, you know, if you have to have a university teaching biology and you want to be at the breaking edge of biology, clearly, I'm sure you find in Singapore very brilliant people there, but if you want, you know, you will need to import people from worldwide. You know, every university does that, by the way. You you have to recruit worldwide. So uh because it's a small country, you don't want to guarantee those people uh you know uh nationality for people, you know. If you are a wonderful professor uh and you go to Paris to teach, the French will be delighted that you become French because there's plenty of space. Uh if you are in Singapore, it's a bit a different thing. So, and if you want to attract people for a contract, I think of three or four or five years, to being teaching or being a top uh financial person or something like that, you have to be given uh uh housing. You know, you cannot say, well, look around. And again, if you are already a top professor of uh biology or physical science somewhere, uh, probably the standard you have to be given to move your career for four years have to be very high. You know, access to amenities uh have to be very high. Uh so probably housing is a major condition. Certainly you have a special permit for uh cars that normal Singaporeans will not have. You know, you expect that you will have a car. So this creates a tension now, I understand. By the way, you have also the other side of the labor market. Uh people would take care of old people. You know, Singaporeans are not doing that anymore. Uh so they recruit people to work in restaurants to take care of old people, uh, you know, junior nurses and things like that from all over the world. And again, they have to give them a contract, they have to house them because they because again of this land constraint, they cannot, you know, even if they wanted, they could not guarantee nationality. So it has to be on contract. And then then suddenly you have two subsectors in the housing market, which are completely controlled by the government. You know, the amount of flow space that a professor of uh you know uh of physics will have has nothing to do with the market. It has to, you are competing worldwide. And you have so the Singaporean who have a normal job, you know, you have a grocery store somewhere, or or even you are you are a professor, but say not international or new, you're a known, uh suddenly your standards of living will be very different from those foreigners. And and then because uh the the island is very small, uh it's a zero-sum game. Yes. You know, in a certain way. What strikes me, following Singapore over 30 years, I guess, 35 years, Singapore had a uh had a normal density gradient. And now the density gradient is reversed. Like uh a bit like a a command economy, but it's not due to that. It comes from, of course, the monopoly of the land development authority on land development. You know, the the housing houses can be uh sold, you know, there's a market for parchment, normal market, but land development is not.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:10

Yeah, but 80% of the land is government-owned.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:14

So you don't uh so basically they start developing very high density uh uh, for instance, in Woodland, you know, in the subway station Woodlands, which is closer to Malaysia, because those were the latest uh station, and it was in empty land. So they did exactly what they did in Moscow at the end, you know, when they expanded uh the suthering road, suddenly uh the technology allowed to build much higher. And uh uh, you know, they don't recycle land. Now I notice that in uh what the station which are closer, Taopayo, they they start uh uh you know redeveloping, but it's rather slow because you can imagine that it's the government to take decisions entirely, it's not the land market. So it's not very popular. People have been using, you know, living in an area with only three or four-story buildings, but they are close to the center. When the the government decides we're going to whatever up things, you know, we are going to, you know, certainly they will be fairly compensated. But you live in an area, you are used to it, you you know, you have your neighbors, you have a school. It's it's certainly politically extremely difficult for government to say. We we decided that you're because there is no, and it's it has to be done at a relatively large scale. You know, it's not one building at a time.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:48

Even though they have a kind of essentially authoritarian government, they they can't do it. But they are still, you know. Because that sounds like a planet's dream.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:54

I I I I call it a muscular democracy. You know, the it's a democracy, but you know, the the uh people for can vote for the opposition. So far, they have never voted for a majority in the opposition. But uh and uh what the mystery for me of uh the system in uh uh in Singapore is that the governments monitor public opinion very, very carefully. And they without being uh expressed by the free press, they take into the government take into account of the public opinion. So they are responsible, you know, they internally have mechanisms to be uh uh responsive, and then they are more tied, I think, on land user development than if they had the pure market economy, which will happen on one building at a time. Uh and gradually. And gradually. So now they they realize, they fully realize, they're very good technically, they monitor them, the disadvantage of a reverse density gradient. You know, it means more people are farther away. Uh the I that's what four, five years ago statistics. Uh people were using uh both public transport, you know, subway and bus, you know, feeder bus to go to subway. Their average commuting time, if I remember well, was 45 minutes. For a city their size is rather on the high side. And that's why now they are trying to palliate that by doing express buses rather than, and by the way, the system of feeder buses and subway is the best in the world by far. You know, in uh in Woodland, the buses who come from the real estate, you know, from housing, are stopping in the station itself. You have to walk, I would say 20 meters between the bus and the subway, and the coordination between the arrival of the bus and the departure is one minute or something like that. It's you cannot have a more perfect, perfectly managed uh transit system. In spite of that, because of the reverse gradient, the average uh commuting time, so they could improve it by reversing the, but that politically is very difficult. So again, it's a completely unique situation. We should all go to Singapore and try to understand what they are doing, uh, because I think it's fantastically well-managed cities. But to say, hey, Singapore is doing that, we're going to do it, doesn't make much sense. Especially for you guys who have plenty of land. Uh you have, of course, excellent technology for transport. You know, the I I was very impressed by the new metro line in Sydney and here too. I mean, when I look at the station, I'm uh I'm impressed by it. So you do not have the problem we have in the US, for instance. So you have comparative advantage of having plenty of land. You do not have constraint of uh being cut by uh Papua New Guinea from water or something like that. Not yet. So uh so you have to use your comparative advantage, but it's always inspiring to visit a city like Singapore because again they monitor very carefully. And by the way, when they they sh they communicate with the public what they are doing, they don't say we are going to invest $20 billion in transport. They say from zone A to zone B, we are going to establish to have an express bus, we'll stop three times there and four times there. And that means that those people living in area A will be able to reach area B. That means 30,000, 50,000 jobs. Uh now it takes them 45 minutes, it will take them 28 minutes. So that's the way they express their master plan. Where in New York we always say we are going to spend uh $20 billion on education, and uh you know, a few years later we monitor what's happening and we realize that most of the money was not used to hire teacher, more teacher, or better teacher, it was used to hire more janitors because it's so much easier to hire janitors and teacher, good teachers. So you see, to measure outcome and impact, you know, the transport time is well, impact would be employment, you know, uh sorry, but impact or outcome is much better than measuring input. Input is money, output is the number of buses you will buy. So if we could manage to express our target as impact, output and impact, you know, even uh out sorry, outcome and impact, it will be much better, but it require uh very courageous politician because that you can measure. You know, in a way, uh spending dollars you can measure, but you have no idea what those dollars will bring. Right. You know, you have cost overrun, you have, you know, you're so so that's I think that's what I admire, admire in the uh, you know, so they they don't, I mean, they have also the periodically master plan, but most of the communication with the public is sectoral, and they say this is what we are going to do, and and the expectation is really uh outcome or impact.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:51

Wonderful. Well, that's Singapore. I want to land the conversation by bringing us back to Australia. One of the things you've kind of remarked. On a lot on this tour is the quality of Australia's public space design. You've sort of repeatedly expressed sort of excitement and that you're impressed by that. And you've also said to me that the one thing, or not the one thing, but one of the things that isn't in order without design is the importance of public space design. So I'd love you to talk about kind of a few reflections on public space design generally and what you think is working in Australia.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:31

Well, I talk about how important it is to have a certain threshold of densities in order to have access to amenities. You know, the higher the density, the more amenities are within walking distance. I'm not talking here about jobs. I'm talking about amenities. And uh so here you have a high level of amenity, but in order to reach amenities, you need good design. You know, sidewalk. When you have a subway station, all this subway station is linked to the sidewalk or the buses. This is missing in many cities in the world. I think that here I found a very high quality of design. The city are very clean, so I have no idea the way you remove the garbage. But as I don't see plastic bags on the sidewalk, I've never seen a plastic bag on the sidewalk. I assume that this is due to design. There are certain ways for truck to remove, move the garbage, especially in the downtown area. Uh certainly it's as difficult as in New York, but you are doing 100 times better than in New York. So I assume that you take into consideration a lot when the garbage is removed, all the trucks will back up in some area to. So this is designed. Then you have to have open space is all good and well, but it needs to be maintained. It needs to be designed well so a lot of people have access to it. And for the little I have seen, and you know, I I went across a lot of parks. I found that the design is, of course, you have a you have wonderful trees, and apparently they grow well, but I'm pretty sure it requires a lot of maintenance too. You know, I it doesn't uh, you know, uh it's very clean, also the parks are extremely clean, and some, you know, especially yesterday I saw a lot of people in the park, and it's still very clean. So that's that's in a uh uh you know a side of design that uh I admire very much. Then I mean, you know, I mean it is uh you know, for instance, the the Museum of Modern Art in Canberra is absolutely magnificent. I will put it among, you know, I could visit a lot of museums, I will put it about one of the top ten in the world, you know, in terms of museum, you know, and uh well, content, and but also uh how easy it is to move, you know, the flexibility, depending on what you show, if it's large or it's small, uh, how you can accommodate it, I mean, and how you circulate within the thing, one of the top museums in the world. So I think that's that's important. You know, that's why we go to cities. When I say these cities are a labor market, it's because I am wealthy enough, and the city is wealthy enough because it taxes, it can have a very, very beautiful uh art museum. And not everybody goes to the art museum, but I suppose it will be true for a concert hall, it will be true for parks, it will be true for a stadium. You know, for instance, I learned that you can access a stadium by transit. Most people go to the stadium by transit. This is very important, you know, rather than uh, you know, if you go by car everywhere, then to get in or get out of the stadium, you'll spend probably two or three hours, or you will have to leave before the end of the party. Uh so that again is design. And you are pretty good at it. So I have not spent much time studying it. I again I look at the outcome. The outcome is very good for me as a tourist. And so uh I admire that very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:21

Final question. What's one thing, sort of based on being here for a little while, that you think more people should know about how Australia works?

SPEAKER_02 1:54:29

Well, I'm sorry if I say that, but uh I think there is still an image of Australia as a crocodile dundy, you know. So I mean sorry to do that, but you know, images are very persistent. And uh I think that it's uh it's a very advanced economy, the fact that the country is fully urbanized practically, that it has relied for its economy on raw materials, you know, the mining a lot, but really now the strengths of the country uh is services. And uh and then the quality of design is something, let's say I knew because of the opera, but by the way, opera was not designed by the uh but but say the fact that you you spend so much money on an opera that uh and it costs so much because the design was so exceptional is again a sign that uh the Australian taxpayer consider that to have a nice opera was important. And again, it's completely consistent with what I have seen. Uh uh sorry, I I go back a bit on uh on the public space because you know the design of private building would be good because you have market signal on it. You know, if you have a sky skyscraper with offices and it's well designed, the the rents will be higher. So you have a big incentive. What's the problem we have with the design of streets and parks is that there is no market feedback. So you don't do it because you have an immediate market, you know, the sidewalk in Fifth Avenue is badly, it's not the right size. You will see it by some people being run over when they try to take the bus or something like that, but people will not link it to design. They will say, oh, people are going too fast, or people jaywalk. Where, in fact, I think that uh here the you know you have no market feedback on design, but you still do it very well because you have people who pay attention to it. This is cultural. And this is something you should market.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:49

That Australians love design.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:51

Love design at uh at the pedestrian scale. You know, uh the fact that you have nice skyscraper were more maybe more imaginative than many of the ones we have in New York. But uh okay, but that's in a way, again, you have a mark. The the public space is well designed. Uh I think it's both in uh, you know, I had the same feeling in Sydney. Sydney, this walk we had around on the I mean, this again. I was watching, of course, you you have a you you have the sea penetrating, so it's always nice, but it could be terrible. Uh, you know, look at Brooklyn, for instance. For for years, the shore of Brooklyn were absolutely terrible. Well, still now half of it is really, you know, industrial waste. And so I think that the way you you you know, the way you can go around uh uh the thing, you know, even uh Dockland in uh in uh Melbourne also I found it extremely attractive, in spite of apparently some people say I uh I were big Docklands defenders, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:56

So I think that this is uh maybe what you should market is this is a an urban uh culture, and uh we pay a lot of attention to the quality of life, not only uh you know, but but yeah, the quality of life, the quality of urban life. Where in New York we have a high quality of the number of people you can meet in New York, a lot of people pass through New York, you you see a lot of exhibitions and all that. But the quality of urban life, if you count it as going from the subway to work, you know, it's not very high. It's uh it can be even stressful. Uh I'm not uh talking about crime even there. I'm just talking finding your way in the evening, uh, you know, through garbage bag and uh uh you know uh sidewalk which are not even uh very well paved, you know, subway which is absolutely for for a foreigner impossible to find your way, you know, unless somebody tells you exactly what uh, you know, the uh all these things are, you know, I I found, you know, I I took the the metro and the tramway very easily by myself, I have no problem taking it. So that's quality of life that I think you should, you know, it's urban life, you know, that it's not, I mean, certainly you may want still to talk about the outback and uh uh sheep farming, but because it's your history, but uh what what attract people, I think, beyond your beaches is uh urban, urban quality of urban life.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:42

Well, you'll be receiving a check in the mail from our tourism department. Alain, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. It's been a pleasure touring with you for for the past week or so. And uh thank you so much for sitting down and recording this. And thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:57

Um I discovered a lot of new things that I didn't know, and uh maybe even like modify some of the ideas before just by looking at uh Australian cities. Which idea? Again, that to not talk about the quality of urban design was a big mistake in my book. Especially if it's understood that order without design means that uh, you know, I was talking at the scale of an entire city. Uh, you know, that to select a design like a finger development is a mistake, or a starfish, or whatever is a mistake that you should have. But I was not talking about the design of streets andor parks. And uh I think I should have had the a clear chapter saying that uh this is important because at the end the quality of life is at the street level.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:49

Well, maybe in the 10th year anniversary edition. Alain, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Inflection Points Podcast, a production of Inflection Points Publishing. You can support the show by sharing it with friends and colleagues and by reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening. You can email us at editors at inflectionpoints.org. The Inflection Points Podcast is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan O'Brien, and edited by Jonathan Leondas. Our music is by Isha Ramdas. Thank you for listening. We'll talk to you soon.