THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 | 9
worldIt was dusk on the opening night of
Burning Man, and the makers and mis-
fits 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 lau-
reate 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 ap-
proached small plazas around the im-
permanent city. How clever, he thought,
this way of funneling pedestrians to-
ward gathering places. And most Burn-
ers probably didn’t even notice — what
with the art projects and orgy dens.
“It’s just like every other city,” Mr.
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 R.E.I., figuring black was the
thing to wear at Burning Man. It was the
first time that Mr. Romer, a former chief
economist of the World Bank, had at-
tended the annual bacchanal, whose
nine-day run this year ended last week.
A week earlier, there was hardly any-
thing here, in the remote desert of north-
west Nevada. Then tens of thousands of
people had just shown 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 econo-
mist who has talked of building cities
from nothing. And Burning Man has
been more and more on Mr. Romer’s
mind, as world politics have made him
gloomier. He is ill at ease behaving like a
traditional academic. He’s not particu-
larly interested in publishing papers. He
doesn’t want to give speeches cheer-
leading his field. But he believes win-
ning the Nobel has expanded his possi-
bilities. 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.
Mr. Romer came to the desert imagin-
ing 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 Mr.
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 over-
sized car seat that shot down one side of
a 31-foot wooden U shape and up the
other.
Mr. 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 con-
structed just days before, in a city with
no building codes. Heavy metal was
blaring. Mr. Romer was trussed into
place. A guy with “PEE HERE” painted
on his back took his glasses. And then
someone gave him a push.
WILD TERRITORY
Burning Man, to catch up the unini-
tiated, takes place for a week in the Ne-
vada 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 for a staid academic.
Mr. 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 says, 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 make-
shift 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 his-
tory,” Mr. Romer told me last year.
“We’re likely to decide in this time frame
what people are going to live with for-
ever.”
Urbanization in the developed world
has largely come to an end; nearly ev-
eryone 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. And
if no one prepares for it — if we leave it to
developers to claim one field at a time —
it will be nearly impossible to superim-
pose some order later.
It will take vast expense, and sweep-
ing acts of eminent domain, to create ar-
terial roads, bus service, trash routes,
public parks, basic connectivity.
That prospect agitates Mr. Romer, be-
cause the power of cities to lift people
out of poverty dissipates when cities
don’t work. To economists, cities are la-
bor markets. And labor markets can’t
function when there are no roads lead-
ing workers out of their favelas.
Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this
moment what Burning Man does every
summer: Stake out the street grid; sep-
arate public from private space; and
leave room for what’s to come. Thenlet
the free market take over. No market
mechanism can ever create the road
network that connects everyone. The
government must do that first.
The history of the Manhattan street
grid, drawn in 1811 over all the land from
Houston Street to 155th, offers similar
lessons. But Mr. Romer fears that Man-
hattan sounds like a chauvinistically
American example. And so when skep-
tics say that it will be too hard to plan for
large new waves of urbanization, he
says this instead: “Look at Burning
Man! They grow to 70,000 people in one
week.”
And then 70,000 people go home, and
they do it all over again the next year.
The planning requires no major ex-
pense, he argues. He’s not talking about
laying sewer lines, or even paving the
roads. Just draw the street grid on the
open desert.
When he first proposed this to me —
Burning Man as template for the next
urban century — I asked if he had ever,
well, beento Burning Man.
He had not. And so we made two trips
there in August: first to see the city sur-
veyed, then a few weeks later to camp in
it.
Mr. 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, naturalresources. They weren’t sure how to ac-
count for ideas. But Mr. Romer, in a sem-
inal 1990 paper, showed that ideas were
central to progress. His model of eco-
nomic growth incorporating them en-
abled economists to ask entirely new
questions about the modern “knowl-
edge economy”: Where do ideas come
from? How do they spread? Why are cit-
ies such hotbeds for creating them?
By the late aughts, Mr. Romer was
sure that cities were the urgent subject
of the 21st century. He had a new idea:
“charter cities” that would be built in the
developing world but governed by na-
tions with more advanced economies
and more rules protecting, say, property
rights and independent judges. He was
picturing British-era Hong Kong, rep-
licated 50 times over.
Some developing-world politicians
were intrigued. Critics cried neocolo-
nialism. Libertarians largely misread
Mr. Romer’s intentions: They saw new
territory where capitalists could shrug
off government rules. To Mr. Romer, the
idea was about seeding the rightgovern-
ment rules.
The proposal forced Mr. Romer tolearn the mechanics of cities. He per-
suaded New York University to create a
new institute devoted to them, and two
planning experts gave him an educa-
tion. Shlomo Angel taught him the foun-
dation of good street grids. Alain
Bertaud gave him a framework: Urban
planners design too much, while econo-
mists cede too much to the market. The
answer lies in between — in drawing the
street grid on the desert.
“The beauty of the mind of Paul is that
he sees patterns where we don’t see
them,” Mr. Bertaud said.
Mr. Romer looked at the Manhattan
street grid, the imagined charter city,
Black Rock City. He was doing this even
in his tenure at the World Bank, where
he worked from 2016 to early 2018.
In all of this, Mr. Romer has been
creeping further from the economists
toward the urban planners.“ANARCHY DOESN’T SCALE!”
Burning Man is an even better model for
Mr. Romer’s purposes than he knew.
The event began in 1986 as a rejection of
rules: There was no central authority,
no prohibitions.
In the early years on the Black Rock
Desert, after the event outgrew Baker
Beach in San Francisco, people brought
fireworks and guns. They raced through
the desert night with headlights off.
They fired hunting rifles from moving
vehicles at vacant cars.
“A lot of people — and I was one of
them — thought that Burning Man was
about this crazy feeling you could have,
being with really creative people that
are all anarchists, and there is no order,
and it’s just amazing what can come out
of that,” said Harley K. Dubois, who at-
tended those early years. “And what
came out of that was some people get-
ting hurt.”
In 1996, a man on a motorcycle play-
ing chicken with a large vehicle was
killed. Then a rave set up two miles
north of the main camp got out of hand.
Three people inside tents were run over
and seriously injured.
The Bureau of Land Management
kicked the event off public land. Long-
time participants split over whether a
more organized Burning Man could be
Burning Man at all.
Today, the event’s six “founders” are
the people who reconstituted Burning
Man after 1996, including Ms. Dubois.
The anarchists drifted away. And the
founders created a street grid, an early
version of what would become a semi-
circular city with all arterial roads con-
verging on a giant, flammable human
figure in the center.
They “invented a sense of superordi-
nate civic order — so there would be
rules, and structure, and streets, and
orienting spaces, and situations where
people would feel a common purpose to-
gether; where people could become real
to one another,” Larry Harvey, one of the
founders, recounted in an oral history
before his death last year.“It had gone beyond a bit of
pranksterism in the desert,” he said.
“We had made a city, and no one wanted
to take responsibility for it.”
To Mr. Romer, this was a teachable
moment. “Anarchy doesn’t scale!” he
said.
Most of the structure that has been
added since feels invisible to the people
who come: the streets that are surveyed
to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that
steer people together without crowding
them, the 430 fire extinguishers around
town, each tracked by its own QR code.
The goal now, one planner explained
to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City
just safe enough that people can joke
about dying without actually dying.
“It’s a metaphor for my sense of eco-
nomics,” Mr. Romer said. “I picture an
economist showing up at Burning Man
and saying: ‘Oh, look! This is the mir-
acle of the invisible hand. All of this stuff
happens by self-interest, and it just
magically appears.’ And there’s this
huge amount of planning that actually is
what’s required beneath it to make the
order emerge.”
On this point, the economist and the
Burners kept converging: Freedom re-
quires some structure, creativity some
constraints. But it was becoming clear
there was more to the structure and con-
straints at Burning Man than Mr. Romer
imagined. As he learned that, he inched
even further toward the urban planners.
After 1996, the founders also began
putting up a fence around the city, a pen-
tagon with perfectly straight sightlines.
Nominally, it is a “trash fence,” catching
debris before it blows into the desert.
But it also defines the edge of the city, so
that it is possible to stand at the bound-
ary line and stare out into an open
desert uncluttered by tents or plywood
art. The fence is an urban growth bound-
ary. It is as much about keeping out in-
terlopers as keeping people in.GREED IS KILLING EARTH
The Black Rock Desert is one of the flat-
test places on earth. The land demands
that you drag race. It is the perfect set-
ting to shoot off rockets.
The desert then returns any mischiefright back, playing tricks on people who
come.
Three weeks before Burning Man be-
gan, Mr. Romer and I drove 100 miles
north from Reno to the tiny nearby town
of Gerlach, then 15 more miles north
onto the parched mud of the playa, ar-
riving, at last, at precisely the spot in the
middle of nowhere where the man stat-
ue would stand.
Over the city’s center point, Coyote
had set up a theodolite, a surveying in-
strument he used to locate 6,000 small
red flags marking the street grid.
It had taken a crew of about 20 people,
sleeping under the stars, a week to sur-
vey the city.
When I had first explained this spring
that I wanted to come out to the desert
with a famous economist to see the parts
of Burning Man people take for granted,
no one was surprised. Two years ago,
word of one of Mr. Romer’s talks at the
World Bank mentioning Black Rock City
had found its way to people here. They
were equally curious about him.
Mr. Romer’s nerdy interest delighted
everyone. He recited details of their city
plan, photographed their traffic cones
and accepted one of their wooden street
pegs as if it were an honorary degree.
“I think they have some experience in
doing this that’s maybe unique in the
world,” he said the next day at dawn. He
was watching a crew raise the trash
fence, their pile drivers ringing like cow-
bells across the desert.
Mr. Romer was beginning to incorpo-
rate these characters into his thinking.
What they do here is a model for any
place with few resources but just
enough volunteers to survey new neigh-
borhoods on the urban periphery. But on
a grander scale, if he ever persuades
someone to build a new city, maybe the
people to call are at Burning Man.
Before we left town on that first trip,
we visited Will Roger and Crimson Rose,
two other Burning Man founders who
have a home in Gerlach. In their living
room, Mr. Romer sat in a leather arm-
chair opposite Mr. Roger. A lineup of
small animal skulls looked over his
shoulder from the shelf behind him.
Mr. Roger warned Mr. Romer that he
had decided he didn’t like cities. At least,
not those in what he called the “default
world,” away from Burning Man.
“All the energy and the helter-skelter
and lack of connection to the earth, the
energy of all those humans compressed
into one space implodes on my own spir-
it, on my own sense of who I am,” Mr.
Roger said.
This is a funny thing to say to an econ-
omist. Helter-skelter is a decent de-
scription of the force from which econo-
mists believe ideas emerge. When peo-
ple live close to one another, rather than
close to the land, they hatch plans, they
trade services, they discuss terrible
ideas until they eventually arrive at
good ones.
This is more or less what happens at
Burning Man, too. But other cities have
become symbols of greed and consump-
tion, Mr. Roger said. And that greed is
killing our Earth Mother.
“I think I have some of the same anxi-
eties, but I’m coming to the view that it’s
the market which is the danger, not the
city,” Mr. Romer said.
“I’m afraid economists have really
been serious contributors to this prob-
lem. This whole ideology of ‘govern-
ment is bad, government is the problem’
has I think provided cover for rich peo-
ple and rich firms to take advantage of
things for their selfish benefit.”He has been trying to figure out how
to atone for that. As Mr. Romer’s conver-
sation with Mr. Roger took on the air of a
therapy session, I got the impression
that he had also come to the desert to
work through his angst with economics.
Mr. Roger, sympathetic, poured him
his first taste of kombucha.LEVI GOES IN FOR A HUG
Three weeks after the survey, Mr.
Romer and I returned. The dusty streets
were now clearly defined as the space
between what people had invented: at
one intersection, a “passport office” for
Burners who wanted to record their ad-
ventures around Black Rock City. On an-
other corner, a troupe of fire performers
from Canada was camped, and on an-
other a half-dozen drivable pieces of art
were parked.
While we were standing at the inter-
section, a man in a great beard and a
blond wig approached with a hug. Levi,
35, was part of a camp running a 24-hour
bar up the street, and we learned that he
had lately been riding motorbikes
across Africa but was about to apply to
graduate school to study cognitive sci-
ence.
Levi, who did not know whom he was
talking to, mentioned to Mr. Romer that
his hero was Daniel Kahneman, the 2002
winner of the Nobel Prize in economic
sciences.“Well, I won the Nobel Prize last year,”
Mr. Romer said. “So Danny is a fellow
laureate.”
Levi’s face lit up, and we then spent
the next 45 minutes wandering around
the neighborhood talking about eco-
nomics and human behavior and
scarcity. Nearly everything in Black
Rock City is effectively free. But you’re
supposed to respond with some type of
gift to the people around you: a piece of
advice, a turn in a hammock, a hot dog.
At Levi’s bar, we were given cups of
something cold and orange and alco-
holic. Mr. Romer, in a comparable act of
generosity, then offered Levi his email
address. He would happily write a rec-
ommendation for grad school, he said.
Levi, floored, went in for another hug.
Theirs was exactly the kind of en-
counter that a city generates, over and
over again, until someone gets into grad
school, and someone else finds a job, and
someone else begins to earn more than
$2 a day.
In Mr. Romer’s Nobel lecture, he im-
plored people to think of cities, espe-
cially in the developing world, as places
where people get the benefits of inter-
acting with one another. A global econ-
omy built on ideas no longer has to be
zero-sum, he argued. Everyone can use
ideas at the same time. Someone living
in America benefits if someone in India
becomes better off and invents a vac-
cine.
But we have to make the cities viable
first, in this moment when it’s still possi-
ble to draw what they might become.
“If we take a pass on this,” he warned,
“the opportunity will be gone.”
He did not mention Burning Man. But
that was before he saw the place in per-
son.Instant city, yes, but there’s a recipe
BLACK ROCK CITY, NEV.
Nobel-winning economist
looks at a desert festival
for a model of planning
BY EMILY BADGER
The economist Paul Romer surveying the Burning Man festival site in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, above, and examining plans,
below. Streets are of uniform width; plazas steer people into common spaces; and the town is equipped with 430 fire extinguishers.ALEX WELSH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThe Burning Man staff headquarters. Observation led Mr. Romer to conclude that
freedom requires some structure, creativity some constraints.Making signs for Black Rock City. “There’s this huge amount of planning that actually is
what’s required beneath it to make the order emerge,” Mr. Romer said.This whole ideology of
‘government is bad, government
is the problem’ has I think
provided cover for rich people
and rich firms.”Tens of thousands of people
showed up, many in the middle
of the night. They formed an
instant city.