Alain Bertaud: evaluation

Transcript context

…Some of your best-known academic work is about the spatial organization of socialist cities. Why were so many socialist cities so relatively empty in their centers or cores? Ah, because according to Marx, land has no value; only labor has value. So if land has no value, and you are in the center of the city, where a lot of people like to live or work, but this land has no value, you are stuck with the existing building. Every time you want to move a building or renew it, you will have to have a planner decide it, and it will be also a cash expenditure. In a market city, it’s the price of land which finances the development of new building, automatically. It is never proposed or realized that the land is expensive and therefore they can’t build more, or asking the planners, “Please, let us build an office building there or something. ” If you are in a socialist country, like I have seen China before the reform, or Russia at a time in the early ’90s, you need the initiative of a planner to say, “We are going to build something new here. ” They will have to compensate not the owner, but the user, to move them somewhere else. So to the state, this is an innate cash expenditure. To replace a low building by a high building is a cash expenditure that the city has to pay, where in a market economy, of course, it is done automatically in a certain way. In a way, the system is reversed. In a market economy, it’s the planners who are slowing down the transformation, where in a socialist economy, the planners realize that it’s not a very good use of land but cannot find the money to change the land use. If NIMBY is such a big problem, might it not — in some bizarre, second-best regard — make sense to put so much industry in the city center? Because as more growth comes, people will be quite happy to get rid of it.…

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