Alain Bertaud intimates that the Chinese government won’t give him a visa to travel there as of up to four years ago?? 
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Alain mentions the “skeleton in my closet”: in the 1980s, the Chinese government asked him if the World Bank would finance a transportation system to get to 5 million (at the time it was 300,000). He balked; now it has 12 million (actually more now I think)
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Alain talks about his dispute with Paul Romer over whether charter cities can work (Alain took the no side). “Cities like Singapore or Mumbai are there for a good reason” – that is, geography
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Market Urbanism Retweeted Market Urbanism
Tyler asks why some countries so blatantly violate Zipf’s law (without mentioning it explicitly), citing Ethiopia and Thailand. Alain responds that it’s politics – governments that centralize populationhttps://twitter.com/marketurbanism/status/1158474586247376896?s=21 …
Market Urbanism added,
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Now for an overrated/underrated segment. Cable cars? Overrated (low capacity). Le Corbusier? Underrated as author and architect, overrated as planner. Best Le Corbusier story? Alain met him at the height of his fame. He said people ask me what I think about being...
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...the most well known architect in the world. “It feels as if my ass has been kicked my whole life. He was a very bitter man...I feel like his bitterness is shown in his planning.” Says he was not a very modest man
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Alain says Haiti’s deforestation was caused by high kerosene taxes, causing the poor to burn trees
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Scooters? Alain says he likes them. (I think they’re overrated, at least with current technology...wildly unprofitable, too expensive and not durable enough)
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“Another skeleton in my closet”: Alain at World Bank insisted they wouldn’t provide infrastructure to kampungs (urban slums) w/o doing proper surveys & property registry. They relented when Indonesia said it‘d be too expensive. Water bills became proxies for title, discounted 10%
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Tyler asks why the New World is so violent. “I don’t know.” I appreciate somebody who can say that! “Is it the long shadow of history? I don’t know. I have no idea. It’s puzzled me a lot.”
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