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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. If you were to meet a 20-year-old Robert Moses before he set out on his career, what would you tell him? I will tell him infrastructure is important, but infrastructure is there to serve people and just look at people. And if you could send the young Mr. Moses, say to Indianapolis, and away from New York City, to do his business elsewhere,. He would have a happy life, but New York would proceed without him.

Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in their designs, resulting in city development that too often fails to address the needs of their residents.

Following the release of his recent book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, Alain joined Tyler in New York City for a discussion of the politics affecting urban centers, his advice to Robert Moses, whether the YIMBY movement can win, why he loves messy cities, what he got wrong about Shenzhen, why the Moscow subway is so wonderful, whether cities can move, favorite movies about cities, the region of the world most likely to start a charter city, how to reform the World Bank, his top three NYC planning reforms, why Central Park is the perfect size, and more.

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Recorded September 9th, 2019 Other ways to connect

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