Learning From Burning Man
A Nobel laureate economist thinks well-designed cities are the key to the future, said journalist Emily Badger in He found a model in a 70,000-person city built in three weeks in the Nevada desert.
BLACK ROCK CITY, Nev.—It was dusk on the opening night of Burning Man, and the makers and misfits were touching up their art projects and orgy dens. Subwoofers oontz-oontzed as topless cyclists draped in glowing LEDs pedaled through the desert. And Paul Romer, a reigning laureate of the Nobel Prize in economics, sat on a second-story porch at the center of it all, marveling at a subtlety of the street grid.
The roads narrowed as they approached small plazas around the impermanent city. How clever, he thought, this way of funneling pedestrians toward gathering places. And most Burners probably didn’t even notice— what with the art projects and orgy dens.
“It’s just like every other city,” Romer said. “Except in this other way, it’s like no city ever.” White-haired and 63, he was dressed in black gear he’d bought at REI, figuring black was the thing to wear at Burning Man. It was the first time that Romer, former chief economist of the World Bank, had attended the annual bacchanal.
A week earlier, there’d been hardly anything here, in the remote desert of northwest Nevada. Then tens of thousands of people had just showed up, many in the middle of the night. They had formed an instant city, with a road network, and a raucous street life, and a weird make-do architecture.
It was an alluring sight for an economist who has talked of building cities from nothing. And Burning Man has been more and more on Romer’s mind lately, as world politics have made him gloomier. He is ill at ease behaving like a traditional academic. He’s not particularly interested in publishing papers. But he believes winning the Nobel has expanded his possibilities. More people will listen to what he has to say, if he can just decide where he wants to direct our attention.
Maybe it’s here. Romer came to the desert imagining himself as an objective outsider: de Tocqueville among the Burners. But Black Rock City started to rub off on him. One morning, a man who called himself Coyote, who was responsible for surveying the city’s streets, took Romer around. At the far edge of town, they found a roller coaster that looked likelier than most things at Burning Man to harm you. It was designed for one fool at a time, strapped into an oversize car seat that shot down one side of a 31-foot wooden U shape and up the other. Romer, surprising himself, walked up to it. “Should I do this?” he asked Coyote. “If you kill a Nobel Prize winner, it’s on you.” Then he climbed the stairs to the top of a contraption that had been built days before, in a city with no building codes. Heavy metal was blaring. Romer was trussed into place. And then someone gave him a push. URNING MAN, TO catch up the uninitiated, takes place for a week in the Nevada desert every August into early September. Thousands of avant-garde revelers come to bend their minds, shed their clothes, and incinerate a large wooden effigy. The event is tamer than it used to be, with more Silicon Valley types and fewer anarchists, but it’s still wild territory.
Romer, who appreciates a bit of shock value, has been showing aerial images of the city in public talks about urban growth for several years. The world, he said, needs more “Burning Man urbanization.” By 2050, developing-world cities are projected to gain 2.3 billion people. Many of those people will move to makeshift settlements on the edge of existing cities, tripling the urbanized land area in the developing world. “To be a little grandiose about it, this is a really unique moment in human history,” Romer told me last year. “We’re likely to decide in this time frame what people are going to live with forever.”
Urbanization in the developed world has largely come to an end; nearly everyone who would move from farmland toward cities already has. This century, the same mass migration will run its course across the rest of the world. It will take vast expense, and
Bsweeping acts of eminent domain, to create arterial roads, bus service, trash routes, public parks, basic connectivity.
That prospect agitates Romer, because the power of cities to lift people out of poverty dissipates when cities don’t work. To economists, cities are labor markets. And labor markets can’t function when there are no roads leading workers out of their favelas, or when would-be inventors never meet because they live in gridlock. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over. No market mechanism can ever create the road network that connects everyone. The government must do that first. When skeptics say that it will be too hard to plan for large new waves of urbanization, he says, “Look at Burning Man! They grow to 70,000 people in one week.”
When Romer first proposed this to me— Burning Man as template for the next urban century—I asked if he had ever, well, been to Burning Man. He had not. And so we made two trips there in August: first to see the city surveyed, then a few weeks later to camp in it. He would see firsthand if his provocative argument held up.
Romer’s logic is connected in a roundabout way to the work that won him the Nobel. Macroeconomists used to think about the world by tallying up quantifiable stuff: capital, labor, natural resources. They weren’t sure how to account for ideas. But Romer, in a seminal 1990 paper, showed that ideas