Cities are shaped by millions of individual decisions. When people choose where to live, work and build, an order emerges from their combined choices – what urbanists call "spontaneous order." It arises from markets and human interactions, not from master plans. 

When planners impose rigid design visions without understanding these forces, they produce unintended consequences: housing shortages, long commutes and inefficient land use. 

Cities’ economies rest on their labour markets – the daily matching of workers to jobs. The evolving commuting patterns generated by this matching contribute to spontaneous order. It is grassroots-generated, emerging at the neighbourhood level. 

City managers must periodically impose a top-down order, linking neighbourhoods with roads, pipes and transit networks. Separating private lots from streets and open space is one of planners’ most important tasks. 

This should be done clearly and well in advance of development, so that buyers and sellers of land know exactly what they are getting, and what they may be liable for. New York and Barcelona both laid out their public grids early, then let private development fill in the gaps. 

Planners should track spontaneous order quarterly rather than relying on data collected for ten-year master plans. Land prices, housing costs, rents, living density, and household incomes should all be continuously monitored. 

When these signals blink red – when housing costs rise too far beyond what people earn – local government should reform its management of land, transport and infrastructure. 

Planners must also be honest about the limits of their knowledge. Future migration rates, household sizes and construction costs are not controlled by governments. Yet these forces shape future demand for land and transport. 

Based on educated guesses, planners should estimate where jobs and housing will concentrate. But they should never turn projections into regulations that arbitrarily constrain land use. 

This is where most zoning goes wrong. Rules that dictate minimum lot sizes, maximum building heights, or how much floor space a site may contain, lock in decisions years in advance. They inevitably produce shortages of affordable housing. 

Cities from Auckland to San Francisco demonstrate this with painful clarity. 

Planners should instead focus on what they can genuinely control and design well: streets, parks and public spaces. That is where planning adds real value. 

The rest should be left to the people who build, inhabit and enliven our cities. They understand their needs better than any master plan ever could. 

Join Alain Bertaud for his public lecture, Making Cities Work, at Victoria University from 5:00pm on 18 March 2026.