More "Reading for Life" News: Order Without Design is Now Available in Chinese

 

There's no better way to spend a morning...

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go." — Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

Life has given me the opportunity to travel to more places, more countries than I could ever have dreamed of in my youth. But reading good books has long taken me even farther, to more countries, sometimes beyond earth; and into the past, sometimes into the future.  Hence today's edition of Reading for Life.

Urbanist Alain Bertaud's Order Without Design is one of those books that's taken me to places I've never been (Yemen, El Salvador, Haiti... ) and taught me more about places I know a little bit about (India, China, New York....)  I've written about the book, and about Alain and his wife and partner in a life of studying cities, Marie-Agnès before, you can find that post here.

Alain and Marie-Agnès Bertaud

Sadly, Marie-Agnès passed away at the end of September 2022 after a long illness. I learned a lot from Marie-Agnès, about cities and satellite imagery and urban design, and also about many other things that comprise a good life.  She, like Alain, has been a great friend to me and to my family.  At my earlier post you'll find links to some podcasts, and YouTube videos as well as some comments about the book.  I especially recommend the several interviews of the Bertauds together by their friend Devon Zuegel you can find there, which bring out some great stories of their life together as well as a lot about cities, their vital systems, and their inhabitants.

I will discuss the life and work of Marie-Agnès Bertaud Roy in more detail in a future post -- it's a topic that deserves more time and attention.  The other news I bring in this short post is that Order Without Design has recently been translated into Chinese.

If you read Chinese -- or know someone who does -- and want to order a copy, you can find out more here.

As it happens, about 25 years ago I wrote a book chapter that summarized a large literature on the "Economic Analysis of Housing Markets in Developing and Transition Economies," which Paul Cheshire and the late Ed Mills were kind enough to include in their Handbook of Regional Economics volume.

The original paper can be found here, but I mention it in this post because there is a Chinese version of this paper as well, which can be found here.

Their are obvious differences between Order Without Design and  "Economic Analysis" ..., for example they were written two decades apart, and mine reads like something written by an academic drudge, while Alain's is livelier and, in some ways, deeper.  But I like to think that in many respects Alain's book and my paper complement each other.  Read both and decide for yourself? 

Some readers of this post will have known one or both of the Bertauds, that is our good fortune. But whether you know them yet or not, read the book and check out the podcasts.  “Reading brings us unknown friends,” is as true today as when Honoré de Balzac said it a couple of centuries ago. Were he writing today, known for his "keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society,"  the author of La Comédie humaine would doubtless have much to say about social media as well as today's books, but would doubtless approve of some of the best of the lot.