Fixing Sick Cities (with Alain Bertaud)

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🗓️ 23 December 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

Why are European cities charming and American cities often so charmless? Simple, says urbanist Alain Bertaud: most American cities are zoned for single-family housing. The result is not enough customers within walking distance of a business, and not enough parking for the customers who drive. Why American cities are zoned that way is related to culture and history. Hear Bertaud and EconTalk's Russ Roberts talk about urban problems and how to solve them--not through urban design or planning, but by respecting what makes each place unique.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.5	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.8	Today is November 26th.
0:39.3	2024, and my guest is urbanist Alain Berthau,
0:42.3	a distinguished visiting fellow at the Mercado Center at George Mason University
0:47.3	and a senior research scholar at the NYU Marin Institute of Urban Management.
0:52.3	This is Alain's second appearance on the program.
0:55.8	He was last here in June of 2019 to discuss his book, Order Without Design, How Markets
1:01.9	Shapes Cities. Today we're going to talk about cities generally in all things urban.
1:06.6	Alan, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:09.3	Thank you. I'm very glad to be back.
1:11.6	You call yourself an urbanist. I like that word, but I'm not sure what it means.
1:17.6	Why do you choose that phrase as a description?
1:21.6	It came from when I start working in Russia at the time where Russia was you know was
1:30.3	trying to convert to to market it didn't succeed but I was working there and my Russian
1:38.6	colleague their first impression I had the title of urban planner, you know, urban planner from the World
1:45.4	Bank. And they say, why the bank is sending more planners? This country is dying from planners.
1:53.1	And indeed, there was a ghost plan where next to the office, and one of them may even say
	...

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