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December 20, 2024

Lessons from Alain Bertaud & His Inaugural AUL Public Talk

Kurtis Lockhart

Founder & Director

This blog is part of an ongoing AUL Public Talk series. World-renowned urbanist Alain Bertaud gave the inaugural Public Talk at the Africa Urban Lab on Nov. 22nd, 2024 during the AUL’s very first cohort of teaching. Stay tuned for future AUL Public Talks from urban thought leaders from across Africa and the world.  

As the Zanzibari sun sank down below the golden, Indian-Ocean horizon on the evening of Friday, November 22nd, the AUL’s students and a packed crowd eagerly awaited the Africa Urban Lab’s first-ever Public Talk delivered by one of the world’s leading urbanists, Alain Bertaud. Bertaud’s ideas preceded him. The 38 AUL students in the audience had been imbibing his thinking all week long as part of the inaugural Professional Diploma program in Urban Development. Bertaud’s writings on urban planning were core tenets of the program, and it was time to hear from the man himself. 

Too often urban planners conjure up city visions based on whatever the prevailing planning paradigm just so happens to be at the time. Or based on their own idiosyncratic planning ideals. The utopian city dreamed up by Le Corbusier, planned on the basis of modernist scientific principles, is one prime example. Le Corbusier’s vision called for straight, rational lines, imposed symmetry, the top-down segregation of the city into pre-planned differentiated functions, and standardized building designs.

The urban plan of Brasilia was designed to look like an airplane when seen from above. Brasilia was inspired by many of Le Corbusier’s planning ideas, but its urban form unfortunately means it has some of the longest average commute times in the world, with informal and low-income residents relegated far out to the urban periphery. 

Ebenzer Howard’s ‘Garden City’ plan is another case. Howard’s idyllic plan attempted to impose a rigid balance between nature and city, coming at a time when the masses were tired of the noxious fumes and industrial hazards belched out by urban factory smokestacks in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. 

It turns out, though, while the factory fumes may not be appealing, the jobs these factories created were. And Howard’s plans oftentimes regulated these factory jobs out of existence. Many of Howard’s ideas for Garden City planning became legally embedded in the British Housing & Town Planning Act of 1909, which itself became the basis for many of the urban plans for British colonial cities across the world. The master plan of Lusaka – the capital of Zambia – is a quintessential example, with Zambia’s 1929 Town Planning Ordinance mandating that Lusaka be developed as a Garden City. 

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas were embedded in British town and country planning not just across the UK, but across many cities that were formerly British colonies. Many of these outdated planning regulations remain in force today. 

Over 60 years ago, urbanist Jane Jacobs described the wishy-washiness of urban planning at the time in her trademark acerbic style: “as in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city…planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.” Today, despite vast advances in data and technology, the discipline of urban planning can still remain frustratingly normative, overly restrictive, and vibes-based. At the same time, the on-the-ground results of these urban plans in low-income African cities often translate into high housing costs, a fragmented, disconnected city, and pervasive informality. At a time when fast-growing cities across Africa are adding almost 1 billion new urbanites with tiny municipal budgets in less than three decades, these cities just want to know what works. In particular, what works at the right price

Enter Alain Bertaud. Bertaud is a renowned urban planner with a decades-long career at the World Bank helping devise functional master plans across many low- and lower-middle income cities around the globe, and more recently, he is a Senior Fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute and the Mercatus Center. 

Alain Bertaud gives the Africa Urban Lab’s inaugural Public Talk in Fumba Town, Zanzibar.

Unlike the grand planning visions of Le Corbusier, Howard, and others, the planning approach Bertaud advocates has both the data and the historical grounding to back it up.

I. Proactive Urban Expansion Planning: Assigning Public and Private Land

First, Bertaud’s talk emphasized throughout that the role of the urban planner should be more restrained than the Le Corbusiers or the Howards imagine. Instead of top-down, divinely-inspired visions often derived from unfounded principles, one of the key jobs of an urban planner is to simply demarcate what land is public and what land is private, ideally in advance of settlement. 

New York City’s Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 offers an illustrative case for the early demarcation of private and public land. The Commissioners' Plan was a visionary step to manage the city’s rapid northward urban expansion. By plotting public land uses like arterial roads and parks early, before settlement, and then letting market forces fill in the rest, the plan nailed a crucial urban insight: simplicity, connectivity, and predictability foster growth. The simple grid layout made construction predictable and affordable, supporting a vibrant and integrated city labor market (more on this below). This wasn’t just good for big developers; small entrepreneurs found a foothold too, benefiting from accessible lot sizes that diversified the city's economic landscape.

The benefits of New York’s grid layout, proactive urban expansion planning, and the high densities these encouraged are becoming more widely recognized. While the grid system once drew criticism, there's a growing appreciation for its functionality—it’s a core reason why New York thrived as a global city since the inception of the 1811 Plan. Meanwhile, places like Brasilia, with its Le Corbusier-inspired, planner-centric design—and associated low densities and long commute times—stand as cautionary tales of what happens when a city doesn't plan with its people in mind. In urban development, as in much else, simplicity and functionality often triumph.

This proactive urban expansion planning approach has already yielded phenomenal socioeconomic benefits for some African cities, and inspires the AUL’s teaching, training, and research. New York University’s Marron Institute, for example, implemented urban expansion planning across 18 Ethiopian secondary cities in the early 2010s. In a follow-up study a decade later, the cities that implemented this approach were found to have significantly better housing conditions, greater household assets, much-reduced travel times, and significantly increased incomes than comparable Ethiopian cities that did not adopt urban expansion planning. Such success motivated the Africa Urban Lab’s research cluster on Urban Expansion & the Periphery, led by Dr. Patrick Lamson-Hall.

II. Cities as Labor Markets: Mobility & Affordability

In addition to the proactive demarcation of public and private land, Bertaud’s talk stressed that cities are labor markets. Smart planning revolves around this simple, powerful fact. He highlighted that larger cities with bigger labor markets mean more productivity, innovation, wealth, and vibrancy—which is fantastic news for everyone!

At the core of these bustling labor markets are three key elements—workers, their homes, and their workplaces. Here's the game: maximize the number of jobs and workers while minimizing commute times. This formula turns cities into well-oiled labor market machines, focusing urban planners on two crucial areas: mobility and housing affordability.

Take mobility—when it comes to commute times shorter is always sweeter. A swift commute increases mobility and expands the effective labor market, making cities more efficient. Bertaud uses the stark example of a woman in Johannesburg who spends five hours commuting to Pretoria every day for work. This grueling travel schedule means she barely sees her children. "This is the new proletariat," Bertaud remarks, driving home the crushing impact of poor mobility on everyday lives. 

Bertaud emphasized that a one-hour commute time (one way) defines the size of the labor market. As cities grow then, maintaining quick commutes is key. This means investing in transportation infrastructure to ensure connectivity across the expanding city. When public transport is costly or limited, it hits employment hard, especially for the urban poor. Conversely, reducing travel time is linked to higher employment growth—music to Bertaud’s ears.

Then there's housing affordability, the other big player in maximizing labor market size. Bertaud points out a harsh truth: if housing costs too much, many people and small businesses are excluded from the city, shrinking the labor market. Often, well-meaning zoning laws or land use regulations push up land prices, reducing affordability, and in turn crowding out the urban poor and micro- and small-businesses. For instance, in Dar es Salaam, the world’s second fastest growing city, the minimum plot sizes are set 10 times larger than in Philadelphia, inflating housing costs unnecessarily.

III. Bringing It All Together

Bertaud’s prescriptions to the would-be urban planner are simple—proactively plan for urban expansion, maximize mobility, and boost affordability. But the ramifications are profound for African cities today. First, African cities are rapidly urbanizing at much lower levels of income per capita than other regions, meaning the continent’s municipalities must urbanize on shoestring budgets. Planning for future urban expansion in advance of settlement is up to three times cheaper than retroactively installing infrastructure after settlement has taken place. Huge cost-savings for cash-strapped cities! 

Second, when it comes to mobility, in a representative sampling of eight African cities, roads make up a much smaller share of urban land than comparative cities in other regions of the world. This translates into African cities being 20 percent more fragmented and disconnected than cities in Asia and Latin America, impeding mobility and driving up congestion and commute times.

Third, in terms of affordability, a staggering 55 percent of African households grapple with living costs that are higher than their incomes would merit; far more than in comparative regions. Housing expenses hit African urbanites especially hard—costing a full 55 percent more relative to similar housing metrics elsewhere.

What’s more, Bertaud’s simple prescriptions are based on economic reality, evidence, and historical precedent. This is a welcome improvement from the grandiose or overly rigid prescriptions of Le Corbusier, Howard, and other earlier generations of planners. 

In essence, Bertaud’s vision for urban planning is not just about building cities but about creating vibrant, accessible communities where labor markets can thrive, commutes are short, and housing is within everyone's reach.

This lecture by Alain Bertaud was the first in what will be a series of Public Talks organized regularly by the Africa Urban Lab (AUL). The Public Talk series will consist of cities-focused lectures from urban scholars and thought leaders across Africa and the world. If you or your institution are interested in participating please reach out to [email protected]. Stay tuned for details on the next AUL Public Talk, coming in May, 2025.