Alex Marshall (born May 7, 1959) is an American journalist who writes and speaks about urban planning, transportation, and political economy.

[5] From 1988 to 1997, Marshall worked as a staff writer and columnist for the Virginian-Pilot,[4] where he came to focus on State and local politics and urban development.

His book takes readers through the construction of property, corporations, patents and physical infrastructure, all of which Marshall views as the foundations for markets.

On September 14, 2012, Nick Sorrentino, in his blog AgainstCronyCapitalism.org, described Marshall's ideas in a Bloomberg View essay the previous day as "nonsense".

Challenge Magazine, a journal edited by Jeffrey Madrick and whose editorial board includes Paul Krugman and Robert Solow, had an article by Marshall summarizing the book's ideas in its March/April 2014 issue.

New-Urbanism advocate James Howard Kunstler gave Marshall negative reviews of How Cities Work, in Metropolis Magazine.

I simply cannot find a consistent or coherent point of view in Marshall¹s long essay on the question, or at the very least an explanation of how cities work.

What's missing is a recognition that the way cities have worked in America for the last half of the twentieth century was a gross aberration from the norms of human ecology that any civilization with a desire to endure would do well to avert.