In this episode, California YIMBY research director M. Nolan Gray chats with Alain Bertaud. Alain’s a Senior Fellow at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a former principal urban planner with the World Bank, among many other titles. In the first half of this episode, we discuss the role of city planning, his optimism about micro mobility, and the perils of starting a city from scratch. In the second half of this episode, we discuss his fascinating career, spanning from post-colonial Algeria to post-Soviet Russia.