Conversations with Tyler (with urbanist Alain Bertaud)[1] COWEN: Next question from the iPad: “When you arrive into a city you’ve never been to, what and how d

Conversations with Tyler (with urbanist Alain Bertaud)[1] COWEN: Next question from the iPad: “When you arrive into a city you’ve never been to, what and how do you prioritize what to see?” BERTAUD: Before Google Earth, I will just walk randomly through the city and usually start from the center, and to have a cross-section toward the suburbs. I will just walk for hours. Just as my father recommended, look with the idea that nothing in this city is random. If you see a barbershop at the corner, it’s because the owner of the barber shop found that it was the best place for his business to be there. If you see a tall building next to a short building, it has a reason, too. You have to try to understand why it is there. Do not think . . . One word I hate that the World Bank use all the time in a report is, urbanization is “haphazard.” There is no such thing. Urbanization is done by people, and they have a very, very good reason for doing it. Sometime distorted by regulation or something like that, that’s true — discrimination — but you have to understand why the city’s it. After Google Earth, then it’s very different because now, I look at an image of Google Earth, and I select some neighborhoods in AdSense (sic) that I want to visit, which intrigue me. Why are they that way? This seems particularly dense or not dense at all. So rather than going at random, I will select the places based on my interpretation of Google Earth. [1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alain-bertaud/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alain-bertaud/