Development Talk: Order Without Design / Rethinking the Role of Government in City Development

The Growth Lab’s Development Talks is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics working in international development. The seminar provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to discuss both the practice of development and analytical work centered on policy.

Speaker: Alain Bertaud, Senior Fellow, New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University.

Moderator: Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Whether attending in-person or virtually, please register in advance. Room attendance is limited to the Harvard community. Seating availability is based on a first-come, first-served basis. The Zoom webinar is open to the public.

Lunch will be provided. Please arrive at 11:45 am to allow for lunch, seating, and a prompt start at 12 pm.

About the speaker:

Alain Bertaud is a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. From 2014 to 2020, he taught a graduate course at NYU in urban economic planning, “Markets, Design, and the City.” In his book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities,” published by MIT Press in November 2018, he argues that a city’s chief attraction resides first in the people already living in it. People and firms, through markets, create a spontaneous order. The top-down design infrastructure that serves this spontaneous order, not the other way around. Cities are primarily labor markets that form the substructure on which all the other social amenities are built. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank, where he worked on developing housing projects in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.