Alain Bertaud’s Book Continues to Make Its Mark
Senior Research Scholar Alain Bertaud participated in a discussion with several Melbourne-based practitioners including Sally Capp, Lord Mayor of Melbourne, and Peter Seamer, former chief planner of the Victoria Planning Authority. In the introduction of Bertaud, host and urban designer Mark Sheppard said:
I’ve been working on the design of cities for about 30 years, and this book completely changed my perspective and that’s quite a remarkable thing. Reading Order Without Design comprehensively undermined my belief in a number of key planning concepts, including urban growth boundaries, urban villages, and this diagram, which many of you will be familiar with and which has formed the basis of a whole range of ideas around transport planning, and it’s just one of the things that Alain challenges in his book. In fact, Alain challenges the idea that we should be trying to dictate the form of cities at all.