Alain Bertaud is currently a senior research scholar at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University.  He teaches an urban planning course titled “Markets, Design and the City” for NYU graduate students. He just completed a book on urban planning and markets published by MIT Press in December  2018 under the title “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities”.  

Bertaud’ s operational work and research focus on the interaction between markets, regulations and transport infrastructure in shaping the spatial structures of cities. His most recent field assignments have been largely focused on urban transport, land development and housing issues and project implementation in cities of China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Vietnam, Columbia, Mexico,  and South Africa

From 1980 to 1999, he was a principal urban planner at the World Bank where he advised local and national governments on urban development policies mostly in China, Central and Eastern Europe, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Bertaud always considered that urban research should be conducted simultaneously with on the ground implementation of real projects.

 Alain Bertaud graduated as architect DPLG from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, section architecture in June 1967. He has published a number of papers and articles in peer reviewed journals (Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Housing Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics) that  can be downloaded from http://alainbertaud.com/