The lost art of building cities

In the nineteenth century, cities often grew a thousandfold while increasing wages, the size of homes, and delivering great public goods like electricity and plumbing to their people. What made them so extraordinary? They had a hybrid of laissez-faire and top-down control. Landowners could build almost anything they liked but street networks were laid out with near-Soviet thoroughness decades in advance. Transport and utilities, meanwhile, ran as regulated monopolies. They were funded by users, turned a profit, but prices were controlled.

Samuel, Ben and Aria discuss what made this system work and why it was dismantled. 

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Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.

Ben Southwood: For a long time, I have
thought that planning was the root

of all evil when it came to cities.

I thought Robert Moses, nasty planner
destroying the lovely neighborhoods

of New York, Jane Jacobs fighting
against the evil forces of planning.

I thought about the beautiful 19th century
cities, completely unplanned, of course,

and the organic medieval grids as opposed
to the nasty gridirons of American cities.

I thought that we used to build a lot,
our cities used to get bigger much

quicker, our cities used to be beautiful,
and now they fail in all sorts of ways.

And you know what?

I was wrong.

It turns out that the cities of the
19th century were much more planned

than I realized, and I had to totally
give up on my lifelong opinion

about the evilness of planning.

And the person who forced me to
believe this is Samuel Hughes, a

co-editor of mine at Works in Progress.

I'm here with him, Aria Schrecker, and
I'm Ben Southwood, an editor at Works

in Progress, to discuss what made the
cities of the 19th century so successful.

But before we get on to the municipal
socialism of the 19th century and

how wonderful it was, I want to
ask Samuel about one way in which

I gather the cities of the 19th
century were very laissez-faire.

Am I right, Samuel?

Samuel Hughes: So there is one core
truth in the standard laissez-faire

account of 19th century cities, which is
that landowners did have very extensive

rights to build on their own land.

You don't really have anything
like planning permission or zoning,

starts to come in a little bit
right at the end of the century.

But basically, you can build up to
quite a high density wherever you are.

So there are some
restrictions on plot use.

You sometimes have courtyards in larger
blocks, and then in Europe, they tend

to have some height restrictions.

It's about five stories in Berlin,
seven or eight stories in Paris,

eventually about 10 stories in
London, six stories in Rome.

But that's about it.

Beyond up to those volumes, landowners
are just allowed to fill things.

Ben Southwood: And in Melbourne and
Sydney and New York and Chicago and

Toronto and Los Angeles and San Francisco,
you can build whatever you want.

Samuel Hughes: In the Anglophone
diaspora countries, there are

normally no height restrictions.

Washington, DC has height restrictions,
related to its status as the national

capital and the desire to have a
very strong civic, feeling in it.

Boston had an inf- it's a very
curious thing, it had an informal

height restriction where there was a
gentleman's agreement among landowners

that nobody would build higher than
the statue on the top of City Hall or

something like, which was pretty high.

I mean, still higher
than any European city.

But otherwise, pretty much all these
cities have no height restrictions,

which is why after they developed
steel frames and, elevators in the

1880s, they get the, like spectacular,
skyscraper downtowns starting to emerge,

which Europeans at the time regard as
like quite thrilling and fascinating,

but also wild, crazy, a bit alarming.

Ben Southwood: But if they're controlling
the height of the building that you

are able to build, then surely that's
like quite a lot of restriction.

Samuel Hughes: Well, it
depends on the height.

So there's one city where

19th century, restrictions like
that really were quite tight.

That's Bremen in Germany, where
they banned apartment buildings.

I think because they saw
them as like, Bremen's an old

Hanseatic city, and they saw

it as like, sinister, big city, French,
southern Europe or something like.

So they wanted it to remain
a city of merchant houses.

in general, the height
limits were set pretty high.

Aria Schrecker: I would guess height
limits are basically capped before

the existence of the lift as well.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, I guess that's true.

So they, the number of stories
that you economically could

build up to was probably

rarely exceeds sort of seven or
so before lifts come in play.

There are examples of going up to 10.

I mean, they physically, it's
possible to build higher.

It's just economically
it doesn't usually work.

People don't want to
walk up all those stairs.

And also if you're building with
load-bearing masonry, the lower part

of the wall has to get extremely
thick, in order for the wall to be

stable if the wall gets very high.

So your upper stories result in- Each,
for every upper story you add, you have to

cannibalize a bit of space on all of the
lower stories when you add wall thickness.

So at a certain point, you stop being
like a net beneficiary from adding

additional stories because there are
so many stories below from each of

which you have to cannibalize space.

So there's a natural limit, and then
cities impose height limits, which

often do, I mean, sometimes push
substantially below the natural limit.

So in Berlin, it's basically five
stories, and you can see the way that

Berlin's all there at five stories, it's
pretty unmistakable that five stories

must have been the binding constraint.

It can't possibly be true that
it just happened over this

huge area that the economically
natural limit was five stories.

Ben Southwood: And they're filling in
all the courtyards and kind of making

the blocks almost completely covered.

Samuel Hughes: Every cubic centimeter
of volume they're allowed under

the five meters is used up.

London is more like an example where
they introduced height limits very

late in the 1890s, and they're not
usually the binding constraints.

It's 80 foot plus two
stories, about 10 story total.

There aren't that many 10 story
buildings in London in the 1890s, so

some in the City of London, I think.

But in most areas what you're
describing, like natural economic

forces are holding densities
below what the limits say anyway.

The general reason why height restrictions
can't be that tight in the 19th century

is because people, they can only
impose one across the entire city area.

And this seems to be
for political reasons.

It's regarded as arbitrary and
despotic for the government to take

development rights away from some
people while granting them to others.

So you, the lowest you can go, so
the, you can't go lower than you are

willing to go in your most dense area.

So if you're not prepared to push
your city center below mid-rise,

then you're stuck with allowing
mid-rise across the entire area of the

city, which is in fact what happens
in every, city except for Bremen.

Ben Southwood: My understanding also
is that other New World cities, so not

just the US, but Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, not I think New Zealand

had much pressure for building up,
but New Zealand and also South America

Samuel Hughes: also lacked height limits

Ben Southwood: and therefore you see
Buenos Aires is full of 14 story buildings

along their main thoroughfares built
in the 1920s and later of course, but

lots of really tall old buildings.

And in Melbourne and Sydney you
find really tall old buildings and

you also do in Toronto in a way
that don't exist in Berlin, Paris.

There are those-

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, that's
definitely mostly true.

There, although I wonder there may
be, like Mexico City doesn't have tall

buildings in the downtown, does it?

So there may have been places which
did have height restrictions, but

definitely lots of places beyond
the United States which didn't.

Ben Southwood: that has a sky- one
skyscraper, a pair of skyscrapers,

like a bridge-like structure.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, then the, I think
it's in Stockholm they have a couple,

so maybe like 12 stories or something.

Maybe, I think I have looked at, they're
maybe built under some special permission.

Some cities also end up with the odd tall
building outside the technical city limits

or this kind of- Like perfectly, obviously
Europeans were no less capable and often

must have had higher land values because
the population was still so much greater.

But the height

restrictions in European cities
are quite an interesting thing

and seem to, don't seem to have
been that contentious at the time.

There wasn't that much pressure for
removal, and seem to have arisen, like

exactly why this divergence between New
and Old World happened is a bit hazy.

Like the justifications for them, like
sometimes it was preserving the immunity

of the street and preserving light.

Sometimes it was sort of
fears about congestion.

Sometimes it was sort of stuff about
fire risk was often adduced, but of

course, like- why would that have been a-

Aria Schrecker: They
had fires in New York.

Samuel Hughes: Right.

Indeed.

Ben Southwood: Let me give a
hypothesis that, I think is

interesting, maybe not true.

But here's two, here are two factors that
I think may have meant there was more

pressure for massive densification in the
central business districts of New World

cities than there was in European cities.

And that's the location of those.

So point one, location of those cities.

If you go through all of the famous
cities of the New World, pretty much New

York is on a really constrained island.

San Francisco on a really
constrained isthmus.

As you said, it doesn't actually
happen in Boston, but Boston on a

heavily constrained plot as well.

Samuel Hughes: I think
they build pretty high.

I mean, high by European cities.

Ben Southwood: Chicago up against a lake.

Melbourne and Sydney up against the sea.

Right.

all of- Toronto up against a lake.

So-

Samuel Hughes: A settler,
a settler city effect.

Ben Southwood: All of these places are up
against, Whereas Berlin, in the middle of

land, you can go in all four directions.

Like Austin or Houston.

London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Rome,
Madrid, all of them are in the middle,

which means they got four directions
to go in, which means they have less

pressure for massive densification
of their central business district

because it can always grow outwards.

So there's one hypothesis.

And the second hypothesis is that
New World cities, because they were

planned, they're basically all planned.

We're going to get onto that.

But the just, the dimension we've talked
about is how you're allowed to do whatever

you want, but there's an element of
which they had much more planning than

any of the ancient European cities.

All the ancient, all the old European
cities, the most economic activity was

happening in the oldest parts of the
cities, which for obvious reasons were

hard to add infrastructure to, right?

So until the middle of the 20th
century, you weren't demolishing wide-

Well, we'll talk about that, but weren't
demolishing too many wide swathes of these

cities to put in infrastructure instead.

Whereas most of the New World cities
came in with wide streets and a grid,

which meant that you could get this
decentralizing effect where you have all

of the economic activity in the center
and then the living activity spread out.

Samuel Hughes: So what we have to-

Ben Southwood: Whereas in Europe, you
see people are still living basically

in the central cores way later.

you have the mixed use instead
of switching into modes.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, I mean, some European
cities, they never completely displaced.

Like Paris doesn't really have a central
business district even today, right?

There are certain arrondissements
which are more office space, but

still have lots of residents.

So it's, what we'd have to check, and
I think it your- it may well be true.

So we- definitely true New World cities
had, American cities had much better

infrastructure, like tram systems
were way better than European cities.

Huge wide streets, loads- no need,
as you say, for the like tortuous

interventions that European cities had
to try and get- So it may be you had

more pressure for commercial downtowns
in New World cities, and thus more

pressure for densification, create like
a hyperdense office district right in the

middle of which everyone commutes into.

And so correspondingly more political
resistance to height limits.

That's a thesis.

Yeah.

Ben Southwood: So this naturally
brings us onto talking about this.

So we've talked about how In a certain
sense, European and American and New

World cities, the cities of the Victorian
era, the cities of the 19th century

were much, in certain senses, much
less planned than the cities of today.

So in basically every country today, and
certainly in developed countries and in

the richest bits of developed countries,
there are really stringent restrictions

on what you can do with your plot, right?

So even in the places that are most
permissive, there'll be a volume

restriction on how much you can
put on that plot, which some places

didn't have at all, but certainly
these places allowed like 10 times or

100 times what we allowed on nearly
every plot today, back in the past.

So in this respect, the 19th century was
extremely permissive and laissez-faire.

Samuel Hughes: The laissez-faire
story is kind of true, yeah.

Ben Southwood: But we've come to the
view that in other respects they weren't.

Tell me about the, about
planning infrastructure.

Samuel Hughes: So the most clearly,
the most clearly authoritarian

features or planning features of 19th
century cities are streets and drains.

So we- And we in London can miss a bit
of this because London's street network

was not planned by a particular central
authority, although it was tightly

regulated by lots of parliamentary laws.

But most of the great cities around the
world basically had plans created by the

authorities for their street network.

Obviously, Americans will know this
because obviously all American cities

have grid patterns, and those can't,
don't arise spontaneously from lots

of landowners, just deciding on it.

So the general system was the private
developer would lay out the streets,

and then the streets were adopted by the
local government, so they'd hand them over

to the local government once they were
finished, and then the local government

overtakes responsibility for maintenance.

The question was what the- like how the
layout of the streets gets determined.

And you do see in there are cases
where they just leave private

developers and private landowners to
lay out their own street networks.

But the problem is when you have lots of
different private landowners next to each

other, they struggle to coordinate to
create a well-integrated street network.

And sometimes there are like classic
collective action problems where

for each individual landowner, it's
optimal to basically have a cul-de-sac.

You can feed off whatever system of
public roads exists, but deny any

kind of through traffic, through
your area and the immunity disruption

that that has to your residents.

But if everyone creates, tries to
create a city out of cul-de-sacs,

you end up with a city where there's
no through traffic for anyone.

that's- Like, nowhere evolves
quite like that, but lots of

places evolve a bit like that.

Ben Southwood: I think
you're understating that.

That is, I would say, the default way of
the development around the world exists.

If you look at the median development
happening now in South Asia or sub-Saharan

Africa, which is where most development
in the world is happening, then you

will find that it looks like that.

That's 90% of world development
that's happening right now.

Only 10% is being planned.

Strangely enough, Samuel and I
recently discovered that Mogadishu

is one of the best planned, cities-

Samuel Hughes: Quite remarkable.

Ben Southwood: -In Africa.

it's really actually weird how different
places at a similar development level are.

So for example, Kenya, fairly well
planned, has lots of high-rise.

Ghana, like pure cul-de-sac shanty
additions to towns on the edges of town.

And there's no obvi- like, you
wouldn't reason from just knowing a

little bit about Kenya and Ghana oh-

Kenya has got much better planned cities.

You probably would if you knew
something about Africa, but if you're

just a totally ignorant person like
me, you could, you would have no

reason to believe that going into it.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, I mean, this
is true in the 19th century as well.

you wouldn't immediately guess
that, Germany and Spain would

have fairly well-planned cities,
and France and Britain would have

much less planned cities, and then
the United States would have its

system of, perfectly regular grids.

the States you might just about guess
because it's a settler society and

they're building cities from scratch.

But the pattern in Europe
is a bit mysterious.

You know, so not immediately
obvious why it ended up that way.

I mean, so I don't, The short
answer, I don't actually

know exactly why it happened.

It may be small elites for quite
contingent reasons determine, and then

societies end up on dependent paths.

The other thing I think sometimes is
countries with particularly fragmented

land ownership are forced to create a
system for developing street networks,

and then they leapfrog the countries
which had relatively unified land

ownership and weren't forced to
develop a system for land assembly.

Ben Southwood: So what you're
saying is that in Britain, we-

there were lots of large landholders
like the Grosvenor family.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, exactly.

Ben Southwood: And they owned sufficiently
large units that when they were planning

them for themselves, they actually had
more or less the incentives of a well-run

local government and planned something,
like if you go around the Belgravia or the

New Town in Edinburgh or something like
that, these planned by private developers.

Samuel Hughes: Edinburgh was the
corporation, but most of the suburbs

of London were private developers.

And they were- I mean, they did do
stuff like put gates around old squares

to try and stop through traffic.

So they definitely did have some of
these collective action problems.

And London's street network is
worse for transport purposes

than Madrid's or Berlin's would.

But basically West- the West End has
an okay street system, even quite

a good street system because they
had fairly substantial landowners.

Whereas lots of cities, it's, it depends
on which area, but especially Eastern

Spain, the Spanish coasts and Western
Germany, you have countries where land

ownership is fragmented through partible
inheritance, where you split the,

when someone dies, their land is split
equally among all their, all their sons.

And so these tiny, tiny estates,
tiny, tiny landholdings that had

come down to the 19th century where
it was basically impossible to

build any kind of city out of this.

And then the authorities are
like, 'Well, we're going to have

to develop a system.' And so they
develop a mechanism for doing this.

The mechanism they
develop is quite clever.

So the normal system was the authorities
draw up a plan called in German the

Fluchtlinienplan, so the plan of the
line of flight, the lines of flight plan.

And then land, they announce it, and
then as soon as it's promulgated,

all the land that's been marked for
future, the future street network of

the city is sterilized for development.

So the owners are forbidden from
building anything on that land.

The land, adjacent to it, they're also
not really allowed to build on unless they

lay out the streets on the designated,
street areas and cede them to the city.

So it looks at first like the poor
landowners are getting a really

bad deal because they're having
a load of their land is getting

sterilized, and the rest of it, they're
only getting conditional rights.

And to satisfy the condition,
they've got to grade the streets and

hand them over to the authorities.

But the upside for them is they're then
just allowed to enjoy all the uplift on

the remaining land, which benefits from
having an integrated street network.

And so the landowners wouldn't, for
the mo- there were exceptions, but

for the most part, landowners are
just pretty happy with the situation

and don't kick up much of a fuss.

That, so that system is widely-
So the European countries that use

this, Spain, Germany preeminent,
Italy uses it quite a lot, and it

later spreads to the United States.

I think early on, the Americans were
more likely to use a more aggressive

compulsory purchase where the street,
state just seizes all the alignment.

Aria Schrecker: A bunch
of New York is aggressive-

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, that's right.

Exactly, compulsory purchase.

The famous commissioner's plan.

Which I think may have worked
better because there were only

a few landowners, and it was so
obvious where their interests lay.

But then they switch over to this more
soft touch system where the landowners

are basically, their incentive is
to do the city's work for it without

compulsory purchase being used.

And so the landowners busily set
about grading the streets and handing

them over to the city as fast as
possible, so they can start to realize

the uplift on the rest of the land.

Ben Southwood: But they could
farm it if they wanted to.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah.

there would never be, it would
never be expropriated from them.

The state might seize a few key streets,
where holdout problems would paralyze the

whole city's infrastructure or something.

But basically, the rest of it,
you could continue doing what

you're doing at the moment.

It won't get taken away from you.

So you live in an area of London
which is kind of like this, right?

So there was mysteriously - it's mostly
19th century, but there was a parcel

of land which just wasn't developed
till well into the 20th century.

Ben Southwood: Yes.

Blackheath, where I live, is substantially
built in the 1970s when there were

lots of open fields next to it.

Actually, it's a good example here of
somewhere, which in my opinion is a

lot worse for its lack of planning.

It's very much got a village character,
which is good in certain respects.

But what it means is that there's only
one street connecting Greenwich, where

there are lots of major roads and there
are sorts of traffic, and Lewisham,

Lee, Kidbrooke, everywhere south of
Blackheath, for miles in each direction.

You have to go two miles in one direction
and a mile and a half in the other

direction to get any through road at
all, which means that Blackheath has

an awful lot of traffic, which means
that it's not a particularly nice

center relative to how nice it could be
because there aren't alternative roads.

And I think about places nearby where
they were built all in one go by

the Victorians on a large plot, and
they have four or five roads doing

the same thing because it's a grid.

Samuel Hughes: Yes.

I mean, it's worth saying something about
how the unplanned cities or semi-planned

cities are different to the planned ones.

So in the case of America, it's
obvious giant grid system, extremely

wide roads, very, very clearly
different to London or Paris.

In the case of European cities,
it's more like they have a system

of these long axial boulevards.

I think that Berlin is probably the model.

Madrid also pretty good.

I mean, Barcelona is a bit like this.

Milan is like this.

Big wide streets capable of taking,
not in those days, not cars,

but substantial volume of trams
and buses and carts and so on.

And then you have side
streets where people live.

And, you know- We Londoners often,
Whereas in London, basically you had

the old medieval system of arterial
roads, like little country lanes,

and the farmers around them would
gradually build up their, their

hou- sell their land to developers
and build up as housing estates.

And the little country lanes would
gradually get turned into arterial

roads and, asphalted by the council.

But you ended up with extremely
limited road capacity relative

to a continental city.

And this bad from a transport engineering
point of view, and also, as Ben points

out, like maybe bad from an amenity
point of view, because the thing you

get so often in London of like the high
street is not actually a very nice space.

There's too much traffic choking it.

It's, like the weird effect you
get in so many places where the

streets around are full of 2 million
pound houses and the high street

feels like, quite kind of, decayed.

This is to some extent an artifact of 19th
century planning, which just didn't leave

enough space for this and ended up with
them being too crowded and too congested.

The, caveat is both in Britain
and in France, the government does

do lots of ad hoc road building.

So they build the private, famous
private roads or turnpikes, well, those

built by private companies, but with
powers given to them by the government,

which add circulation in rural areas,
and then they also sometimes will

cut roads through the city center.

And Paris is the most famous example
of this, where the various governments

slice large roads through the center of
the city to improve traffic circulation.

and London does it to, in fact,
does it to about the same extent,

although much less spectacularly.

Ben Southwood: The Embankment,
Shaftesbury Avenue, Regent Street.

I'm sure we could think of more.

Aria Schrecker: Marble Arch

Samuel Hughes: Victoria Street.

Aria Schrecker: Yeah.

Samuel Hughes: It's a
whole, whole family of them.

And those are a similar kind of
traffic planning to what's going on in

the continent, but done in this very
ad hoc way, not done with like a big

document where you can see there's
one map which says these are where all

the roads of the city are going to be.

And it doesn't, It leads to cities
operating better than they would have

done if they'd had nothing like that,
but still less well than they did

in countries which had more of it.

So this was my first like surprise.

Turns out that 19th century governments
were highly activist on street

planning, and did it all they were like,

These plans l- have a slightly Soviet
quality to them where you can literally

look at this document and it has all
the future road networks of the next,

half century laid out in front of you.

The same thing is
basically true with drains.

That was the other thing where they
couldn't find any way of getting

private enterprise to do it.

Private companies would provide
a little drain for the one

street they were building.

But-

Aria Schrecker: I guess they just
drain it off into the public commons

and leave people to deal with it.

Samuel Hughes: Into the
nearby stream generally.

or they just leave people to rely on the
old system of, having, storing their waste

in cesspits and having it collected by-

Aria Schrecker: I thought this was
quite interesting, in that, so at

what point do people stop, at what
point do people stop paying for

people to take their excrement away?

Oh.

Because you hear about like old-timey
sort of plague-ridden European

cities where people are just throwing
their bedpans out the window.

Samuel Hughes: I think that
probably never happened that much.

Okay.

And certainly by the early modern
period, that's not happening.

The, so-

Ben Southwood: The early modern period?

Samuel Hughes: Like, b- after,
by the 18th century, there's

certainly now it's not happening.

So the, it's, or not happening very much.

You'd find like back alleys where
people do it surreptitiously,

but it wasn't legal.

The system is partly, so there's a
whole bunch of verbal confusions here.

So one thing, is people hear
the phrase, so popular history,

so probably obviously like-

Aria Schrecker: I read
the Horrible Histories.

Samuel Hughes: Right.

Popular historians love terrorizing people
with stories of the hygie- like personal

hygiene in the past, and everyone finds
it very like, 'Oh, I can't imagine how

awful it w- ' so one trick is to say,
these cities had open sewers, and people

would dump wastewater into open sewer.

Now this is true, but a sewer
just meant any open waterway, so

any stream counted as a sewer.

And you could, You were allowed
to dump wastewater, but not the

so-called black water, so human waste.

You were just allowed to bu- you
were allowed to dump gray water,

which is like water you'd use for
washing or cooking or something.

And it was illegal to dump black water in.

So London was indeed full of open
sewers, and they played a vital role

in clearing away all its waste, but
not really in a very grotesque way.

they were just streams and people
were putting their, their cooking and

cleaning water into the streams, and
then the streams were flowing away.

And the waste was being stored in
cesspits, and then people would either

pay for it to be, they, the economic
model was obviously people pay for it

to be taken away, but also farmers paid
for it to be brought to them because

it was extremely valuable fertilizer.

So it was quite a profitable
industry with, with removing.

That system is basically an
okay system in lots of contexts.

There's amazingly little consumer
demand for getting rid of it.

People are kind of seem kind
of happy enough with it.

In some places it lasts for
ages, like Japan still uses

it in the post-war period.

The Australian city of Brisbane
apparently keeps using it till the 1970s.

They just for some reason they never
got around to it or it was so low

density that building a modern sewage
system was a bit of a pain or something.

Aria Schrecker: So what, people's
toilets empty into some communal

sewage tank and then people, I guess,
in trucks drive and take it away?

Samuel Hughes: Or, just
on their own house.

Aria Schrecker: Okay.

Samuel Hughes: They, or they have privies
of some kind empty into a pit, brick-lined

pit, and then it gets, taken away by a
person called a gong farmer or, a night

man, and then they take it away in wagons.

It's, the gong farmers were apparently,
I mean, I don't think it was the

most agreeable job, but they were
apparently very well paid and-

Aria Schrecker: Because it's
not a very agreeable job.

Samuel Hughes: And they were quite
a fierce lobby against introducing,

modern sewage systems because obviously
that would wipe out their business.

They and the farmers were push against it.

There are even some cases, I think
it was one German city, I think

Dusseldorf, where they, the city built
its new system, new piping system, but

it was only used for draining public
spaces of like rainwater and so on.

They didn't allow people to plug in
privately to it because the gong lobby

had, lobbied so fiercely against it
that, to preserve their own interests.

Ben Southwood: So we have the yes
case, the laissez-faire case of

what you could do with your plots.

They were pretty laissez-faire,
extreme laissez-faire in like New

York, and then quite laissez-faire
in the most authoritarian parts

of Europe, like Germany or Spain.

But they were still pretty, you
could do pretty much what you wanted.

And then on the extreme other end, we
have basically Soviet or CCCP style

50-year plans for where all the buildings
will go and where the roads will go and

what infrastructure will be built where.

These were two important elements
of success of the, what I keep

calling the Victorian model.

I don't know whether you can, whether
I can, I should actually use the word

Victorian to describe the whole world
because it was the whole world, not

just England in the 19th century.

Aria Schrecker: Well, she has- But the
sun never set on the British Empire.

Ben Southwood: Yeah.

And it did actually cover, I suppose,
Australia and New Zealand and South

Africa and various other places as well.

Samuel Hughes: The term Victorian is
used a bit in continental Europe because

Queen Victoria has such like brand power
and did people do feel this like this

curious woman with her intense piety and
her like strong public spirited notions,

and her kind of the- has something of the
kind of unstylishness of the Victorians

as well as kind of heaviness and the
dark colors and this kind of like, she

works really well as a brand icon for the
period and that so I think the usage has

spread so I think we may allow ourselves
the term without being parochial.

Ben Southwood: Fair enough.

Although I'm going to try
and say 19th century anyway.

So on the one end, we've got
baufreiheit, freedom to build

whatever you like, general rule.

So laissez-faire, they
get one point for that.

On the other hand, you have
municipal socialism for drains and

roads and to some extent for other
kinds of infrastructure as well.

But I gather there is a middle point
where it would be hard to put it in either

of those buckets because it has certain
features of cutthroat capitalism and

certain features of municipal socialism.

And you might even say it's like
the Judge Glock or the Tom Forth.

If you were to choose an English
character, Tom Forth, choose

an American, Judge Glock.

Their story is what
comes out the most here.

So this is like running public
services, but for a profit.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah.

So it's transport and utilities
and they start out as pretty,

laissez-faire on this as well.

So whenever a new, like piped water,
electricity, gas are invented or a new

transport mode is invented, railways,
trams, buses, they start out leaving

it more or less to private companies
to do what they like, and they

encounter a couple of key problems.

One is that private companies,
so they're engaged in frenzied

competition against each other.

They bid down their prices quite low.

Normally, we think that's a good thing.

Obviously what you want is companies
to be pushing their prices down.

The issue with transport is you sometimes
end up with less transport as a result

than would be maximally efficient.

So the reason for this is, like if
you imagine if I go, If I take the

train to go to a wood and go for a
walk by myself, then I'm getting all

the pleasure from my journey, and the
transport company has the same power

that any like consumer-facing business
has to capture the value of my journey

from me through charging me a fare.

But if I go to visit my grandmother,
then I get value from visiting my

grandmother, but my grandmother
also gets value from, hopefully,

value from me going to visit her.

And the transport company can't
bill my grandmother for this.

it has very little way of
capturing value from her.

And there's loads and loads, nearly
everything we travel for, in fact,

we're traveling to do things with other
people, and the transport provider can

only ever get the value capture from the
person doing the traveling, not from the

many more people to whom they travel.

And so there is a tendency for the
free market to underprovide the,

transport services relative to what
would be, maximized social value.

That's your first market failure, and
the reason, now, they don't have a

complete developed theory of this, but
they can, they realized the competition

is causing prices to crash to an,
somehow an obviously unhealthy or crazy

level, we are underfunding our services.

We're not having any money for investment.

Something's going wrong here.

So they work out in like, they
have like a folk understanding of

a market failure going on there.

Aria Schrecker: I guess you also
have a problem of duplicating things.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah.

That's right.

Yeah.

This is the more entertaining one.

So classic example is imagine a beach.

Imagine people are evenly distributed
along the length of the beach.

You start out with two ice cream vans one
third of the way along the beach each.

Now, left ice cream van thinks, 'What if
I move down to the middle of the beach?

In mid- like, I'm able to capture a whole
bunch of people in the middle of the

beach from my arrival, but all the people
to the left of me are still start going

to me, so I've just gained from this.'

Guy on the right obviously is like, 'Well,
I'm not going to let this happen,' so

he too moves to the middle of the beach.

And in the end, the two ice cream
vans end up right in the middle

of the beach next to each other.

They've each still got
only 50% beach share.

But for half the people on the beach,
they're now much further from the ice

cream van than they were previously,
and they're getting a worse service.

So this is a pattern for markets with
a certain structure for the different

providers to con- pro- like, converge
in the kind of good that they provide,

such that the consumers ultimately
end up with a worse range of products

than would be socially optimal.

This happens pervasively with transport.

So the most picturesque example is in
Kent, where there's two railway companies

going from London, building railway
systems to Kent, and they basically

build duplicative systems arriving at
different London termini, going to much

the same places in Kent on systems like,
the government forces them to allow their

lines to cross each other sometimes.

Although even that, obviously, they're
very unwilling and would prefer

to block each other from crossing.

And they, but they refuse
to use shared alignments.

They refuse to do, And the, Kent ends
up with basically two duplicative

rail systems providing very little
additional value over one railway

system, and far less value than they
might have done if they used the same

quantity of capital but spread it
out to reach a wider range of places

or to provide more interconnections.

That's what constantly happens when they
introduce these new massive systems of

infrastructure, utilities and transport.

And what they realize, again,
they don't like Hotelling is the,

economist who first describes this
formally in the 1930s, I think.

He doesn't exist yet.

They don't have ho- they
can't call it Hotelling's law.

But again, there's a folk theory
appears and, well, hang on,

Kent's got an insane system.

Obviously, we need to
coordinate this somehow.

This is clearly extremely wasteful.

And so they've, they're like, their
economics is badly formalized, but in

fact quite good in a kind of, working way.

Aria Schrecker: So Japan
has mostly privatized rail.

Does Japan have this problem?

Samuel Hughes: Ben, you might know more
about it than I. I suspect the systems

are tightly, like the alignments are
tightly controlled by the authorities.

Ben Southwood: I think it's
more of a trade-off than

Samuel is giving it credit for.

I think that while an optimal system
definitely has one provider, then

you rely on your wise foresighted
municipal socialists to build you

the exact correct network, and
they're not always forthcoming.

Whereas, and also on the other hand,
that you don't always, you don't

necessarily compete prices down
to efficient levels afterwards.

They might be too low, under the system
with competition, but they can also be too

high under the system without competition.

So I think that the upside of the
system we had in England and Japan,

in Britain actually, across all
of Britain, and in Japan, where

there were many private companies
competing, fighting to give alignment,

to get alignments and then often-

So for example, to take an example, I
gather that there are three entirely

separate lines between Osaka and Kyoto,
and which are obviously now part of

the same like huge urban agglomeration,
but by the time they were built, there

was countryside in between them That
means that the services between there

have been forced to get better and
better and better, and they have the

best service in the country is on that
specific spine because competition works.

Now, the downside, of course, is
that there's wasteful duplication.

and I think the wasteful duplication
problem is probably larger in

infrastructure than in other areas.

But of course, it is a feature of
all markets we have, is there's

wasteful duplication, right?

Like, it would probably, in a sense, it
would be better if there were not two

companies trying to provide us shoes
or cars or whatever, because they're

investing all the same R&D efforts twice.

They're building all the,
up all these factories.

They could be doing it
one more efficient scale.

Loads, loads of their products get forced
down to fire sale prices because they

don't sell and all those sorts of things.

Samuel Hughes: I mean, one issue with
infrastructure may be that, so if you

have two companies which are initially
duplicating lots of the same overheads and

they engage in struggle with each other,
and then even- if it's a natural monopoly,

one company eventually conquers the other.

Or if it's a natural duopoly, there's a
bunch of companies at first and you end

up with two companies at a competing date.

There, it's fairly easy for them to
then cut the overheads and achieve a

more efficient supply system later on.

With lots of kinds of infrastructure,
it's tortuously difficult, maybe

kind of impossible in lots of ways.

So, like Kent today, eventually the
two railway companies merge in the

early 20th century, and now they've
all been nationalized, so obviously

they're owned by the same organization
that owns all British railways.

But they've still got a
lot of crazy alignments.

It's been a little bit rationalized over
time, but it's politically so difficult

to get a new alignment or to close an
alignment once an alignment exists.

Ben Southwood: Alignment just being
the right of way- The right of way, the

space on which a railway lives, or a road
in fact, any piece of infrastructure.

Samuel Hughes: So I think often with
infrastructure, you, it's got its weirdly

like funny political reasons to do
with how invasive of space it is, and

how dependent people become upon it.

it's got a kind of weird one-shot game
character where your fragmented market

results in a permanently inefficient
endowment of alignments afterwards.

Whereas in other economic sectors you're
always being efficient at first, but

you get lots of the consolidation later.

Aria Schrecker: I guess infrastructure's
got more complicated externalities, right?

Like, people don't really want a new
train line right next to their house.

You've got to do the thing we
were talking about earlier-

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, exactly that.

Aria Schrecker: -Where you've got
to compulsorily purchase or find

some weird scheme to pay people off.

So you can see why it's more wasteful
than having an extra shoe factory.

Although people are very concerned
about excess fashion that people

are producing and throwing into
landfill and stuff as well.

So potentially it's the
same kind of problem.

Samuel Hughes: You get some elements
of it, but not anything like the

same intensity, and closing a factory
when to consolidate into a bigger

factory yes, people will complain.

Yes, it's just about possible that
the government might intervene

and stop them from closing, but
on the whole, that doesn't happen,

and they are allowed to do this.

Whereas closing down a piece of
transport or utilities infrastructure,

you're really like- Yeah, it's an
era defining thing when that happens,

and you get a huge amount of-

So there are some special
features of it in this respect.

There's also the fact, like the two
market failures here are related.

If indeed competitive pricing results
in underinvestment relative to what's

efficient, then one of the key advantages
of competition in other cases is not

in fact an advantage in this case.

And these, at any rate, the view they
arrive at is you do want there to be

a single provider of these kinds of
infrastructure per, either per like a

large area of a city or for a whole city.

Not of all, not usually of all
the kinds of infrastructure,

but per transport mode or per,
infrastructure, like a utility type.

And they find various different
ways of producing this.

So some countries set up like
state-owned companies that do it.

This is the German model.

Some countries, have a franchise
system where just one private company

is given the right by the government
to build and run infrastructure.

Some, that's the American model,
some countries have a concession

system where the government owns the
infrastructure but gives out leases to

private companies to, or concessions to
private companies to operate it for sort

of periods of 20 years or something.

All of these systems, they sound very
different, but all these systems share the

basic features that, they are funded by
user fees, not through taxpayer subsidies.

The companies that operate them
usually make money from operating them.

Even like including, interestingly,
the municipal governments.

So the municipal companies were
normally profit-making, and the local

taxpayers were very keen for them
to expand infrastructure operations

and raise prices and get more out of
the business so that they could then

cut taxes with the proceeds from it.

At least they were sometimes keen,
obviously, the politics were complicated

then even as, as they would be later.

So profit seeking, paid for through user
fees, and owned by a single provider.

The ownership structure was quite
different in the different cases, but

the behavioral patterns that they ended
up with were surprisingly similar.

And although these companies were
aiming to maximize their own, I mean,

the private companies were definitely
aiming to maximize their own profits,

and the state-owned ones were often,
to a large extent, aiming at that.

They end up with behavioral patterns
that seem to be fairly close to being

value maximizing for the city as a
whole because they provide- They're

very keen to provide infrastructure.

They provide as much of it as possible.

but they provide a unified kind of
infrastructure for the whole city because

they- so they don't succumb to hoteling
problems because if you don't want to

cannibalize people from your other line
because you also own that line, so your

in- your, incentives are to space out your
lines in an efficient way across the city.

Aria Schrecker: Are there other
markets where we like these monopolies?

I'm thinking, France's energy market, EDF.

That seems to be run by, at
the very least, a private

company that is a monopoly.

I think a couple of health insurance
things are like this in countries

where they have mandatory insurance.

I think Israel, they make you have,
there are four insurers, so limiting

the number of insurance providers.

I think Singapore does the same with
about three or four as well, possible

different providers that you can have.

Ben Southwood: Here's what I
think is the best, parallel.

Drug development.

So in drug development, we recognize that
the fixed costs of developing the drug

in the first place are so large, like the
fixed costs of building out a gas grid

or building out a railway network, that
we think that our usual desire to have

lots of competition, even at the cost of
wasteful duplication, isn't worth it, and

we should therefore give them a monopoly
for 20 years and then let everyone copy

them for free afterwards, so that no
one at any point puts any investment

in to develop the same drug twice.

Because otherwise, we'd be
developing the same drug twice.

It might not be worth doing.

We wouldn't get the
drug in the first place.

And so we try and, there are
loads of features of this market

that work exactly the same way.

So for example, if you had spies in all
your competitors and we didn't have this

kind of protection, you would hear, 'Ah,
yes, they're bringing out a GLP-1 drug.

You know, they're gon- they're going to
conquer, And they've proven that it works.

So we should quickly do all the
experiments because we know it will

find out, we'll find out that it works.

Run up the same drug, and
maybe we can even rush it to

market slightly before them.

But even if we can't rush it to
market slightly before them, we can

rush it to market just after them
and capture half of the market.'

and-

Aria Schrecker: Isn't that what happened?

Ben Southwood: No.

well, I mean, they developed a second
GLP-1 because they thought the market

would be sufficiently big enough
or because they thought that they

could improve upon the existing one,
and in fact, it turns out that the

developments were all worth doing.

But usually what happens with a drug is
that it gets released straight away, so

everyone, because you have to protect it.

To, in order to protect it, you have
to tell everyone you're working on it.

So people have an incentive to give
it out the first moment they're

considering developing a drug like
X or Y. Then everyone else realizes,

well, if we do develop an alternative,
we'd have to do it, get it through all

the stages within the 20-year period
by which this has gone out of patent.

And after that 20 years, we and anyone
else can create a generic, for almost

no cost and well, there'll be no market
to capture, and so it's designed, the

institutions may not be perfect, but
they're designed basically around the

exact same economic principle of there's
no point having two very similar drugs,

and especially at the cost of billions of
extra investment that the drug develop,

drug company investors have to put in.

That's the same.

and I think the key feature
here is fixed costs, right?

So the key point about railways is
that you can't just pick them up again

and put them out down somewhere else.

You can't reconsolidate and
make it efficient afterwards.

You get the alignments that you're
stuck with, and getting them in the

first place was so expensive that
we actively don't want people to

wastefully duplicate them too much in
a way that we're usually willing to

take the costs of wasteful duplication.

In fact, I am constantly arguing
that we should have more wasteful

duplication within the state sector.

I think that there's not enough government
bureaucracy wasteful duplication.

In my experience, if you find yourself
talking to a civil servant, especially

senior civil servant, than saying,
'We're not doing this,' they'll

say 'What are you talking about?

There is the XYZ pathway we invented
in 2004, and you can use that to do

exactly the thing you're talking about.'

And I'll always say, 'Well,
if we're not doing it, then

that means it's a bad pathway.

We should have a second one.' Or
whenever they, whenever the state is

most effective, like with Operation
Warp Speed in the US or with the Vaccine

Task Force in the UK, or indeed with
like DARPA's when they've set them

up and ARPA-E in the US, particularly
effective bits of state infrastructure,

they have usually been a new institution
competing to provide a state service

that's already being provided.

And so we often need more
wasteful duplication.

But I agree that infrastructure is
a case where at least per mode, we

generally, sometimes you want two.

I think that Chicago - New York, for
example, and Manchester - Liverpool

were such important train spines that
in the Victorian era it was worth

having two separate competing companies,
and maybe it may have been true of

Tokyo to Osaka or whatever as well.

But, in general now, now that
we have roads and airplanes

as well, one is enough.

Samuel Hughes: Of course, there were
competition did find ways of working

its, So under the concession system
Your concession expires after 20 years,

and then the state can renew it, or it
can give it to one of your competitors.

And France has these two giant companies,
which interestingly still exist.

Veolia, lots of we probably all
have our bins collected by Veolia.

This is a 19th century French
company that originates as a

concessionaire for French utilities.

Those two companies were indeed
ferociously in competition and would fight

like crazy to get the best contract to
offer, as you know, to get the contracts

from the towns by ultimately through,
among other things, through price cutting.

So you did- and franchise, the franchises
in the States did the same thing.

With the state-owned, companies that
would be less true in a way, although

you still get competition between towns,
or competition between modes, as there's

often the different bits of the sector
will be in, different bits of the com-

like different transport modes might
be in competition with each other.

And then of course, 19th
century municipalities could go

bankrupt, and the state would
never bail them out if they did.

So they overall still have sort
of some kind of quasi-competitive

incentives in place.

Ben Southwood: I think the way
I would say it is that they have

competitive incentives between them
and other municipalities, right?

Right.

So there are- So what people don't,
I don't think mentally internalize,

especially in the UK, where we've
lost most of our competitive

features of local governments.

But I think in lots of countries
they're muted to at least some

degree compared to the sen- the local
governments of the 19th century.

In the 19th century, it wasn't just that
you thought, 'If we grow, I can produce

this great public good,' or, 'I'll be
able to build a big, like a wonderful

park or plaza in the center.' And I-
But I'm sure those things did exist,

and there was urban pride, and so there
were positive goals people wanted.

But there were also negative worries they
had, which were, 'If my tax base thins out

enough, then I won't be able to provide
like really basic stuff, or we'll go

bankrupt, and that might personally affect
me.' You know, some of these corporations,

the trustees were individual rich people.

Samuel Hughes: Earlier on, yeah.

Ben Southwood: Later that wasn't true.

But, so I think that worries about losing
your tax base were really important.

So there was competition between places.

But the other feature is not just, is
not- I wouldn't call it competition per

se, but evolutionary dynamics, the fear
of being wiped out, or not even just

the fear of being, being wiped out, but
the fact you could get wiped out and

then replaced by something else; those
two things put together are why we get

success, I think, in normal markets.

One is competition, but if competition
doesn't work on you and you don't

improve your game, then you get
liquidated and all your capital

gets redistributed to someone else.

And that, both of those things were
working on the local governments

in both coun- most countries
of the 19th century, right?

Samuel Hughes: Now there, yes.

I mean, how far- Are there
examples of this continuing today?

Ben Southwood: I think that you can
more or less describe American and

Swiss local government as working
under kind of these features.

Arguably French local government
in some respects as well is, but

is more complicated, especially
since French local government has

ebbed and flowed in its powers.

I believe lots of them were brought in
in the Gaston Defferre reforms of the

1980s, and then lots of them were taken
away in 2018 by Macron, or at least lots

of their incentives were taken away.

So it's complicated.

But the countries with most powerful
local government historically have

always been Switzerland and the US.

And I think they still mostly have
all of these features, like local

governments are, are fear going bust.

and also local governments in
Switzerland very explicitly compete

to get residents with each other
with tax rates and- Right, and so on.

Samuel Hughes: I see.

Ben Southwood: We have discussed
three features of local

governments of the 19th century.

One is that they were very
laissez-faire about what you

could build on a given plot.

They let you do pretty much what
you wanted with limited binding

constraints in most places.

Two is that they were
very social plannery.

They had five-year or 50 or 100-year
plans for where you could build and

where would it, infrastructure would be,
and they planned in much higher amounts

of space for infrastructure and public
uses than the free market planned in

the places that the free market planned.

And then the third thing is that
where there were public services

that weren't public goods like
infrastructure, or that didn't, that

weren't extremely high in terms of
their, spillover effects, they charged

for them and in a profit-making way.

Now, I think we don't just think that
these were, these happened to be features

of cities when they grew at their fastest
rates, but actually were part of why they

were able to grow at those fastest rates.

And I'll give an argument for,
so one of them is obvious-

Aria Schrecker: I think we should
spell out quite how fast they

grew during this time period.

I was surprised to learn, what,
that like Chicago grew by 5,000%

or something ridiculous like that.

Samuel Hughes: So New World
cities are the most extreme cases.

Obviously slightly artificial if you
give them in percentage figures because

they started out as nothing or as-

Aria Schrecker: Oh it was like 20 people-

Samuel Hughes: From whatever point
you started at but none the, like

Chicago is a city with well over a
million people by 1914, of having

been nothing at all until about 1830.

And this is and lots of major New
World, like New York starts the

19th century with 60,000 people,
and it ends it as a gigantic city

with many millions of people.

Aria Schrecker: I guess it's a
time when basically population was

exploding across Europe and America
and like basically all over the world.

So I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

And also everything is industrializing
and urbanizing as well.

Ben Southwood: But you might say those
things are kind of the other way around.

Right?

so you might say that we could have
had a system whereby like the, Samuel

uncovered a really fun example once
of the cowocracy of Nottingham.

So, it turned out that there, the farmers,
the cow, the cattle ranchers of, ranch

is really the wrong word, but the cattle
grazers outside Nottingham, which is, a

big city in the East Midlands in the UK.

The cattle grazers outside Nottingham
had this weird collective ownership

of the fields such that they couldn't
sell the fields off to expansion

like anyone else could have done.

They could only collectively decide,
and there would always be one guy who

said, 'No, we shouldn't do it.' and so
Nottingham was constrained in a way that

most English cities were not, and you can
compare it to Derby or Sheffield, nearby

cities, to see how different it was.

Samuel Hughes: It became incredibly
densely built up and overcrowded

by 1830s or whatever, like it was a
continental, like a heavily walled

city on the continent where every
cubic meter had been filled with a

half dozen children and this- and
then finally they burst through.

The Parliament passed legislation coming
over, overcoming the cowocracy, and the

city exploded outwards very rapidly.

Ben Southwood: Yeah, it has
actually a really nice center.

If anyone would like to visit somewhere
nice in the East Midlands, I think

Nottingham is particularly good.

Samuel Hughes: Nottingham's
a really nice town, yeah.

Ben Southwood: But I think things like
that could have existed everywhere, right?

So urbanization wasn't just a background
force that was destined to happen.

Urbanization was permitted by
building the places those people

could move to at least some extent.

And so I think partly building great
urban centers was a part of how

those urban centers got populated.

And I don't know about rural
population growth, like to what

extent I want to claim that that was
partly driven by there being city

jobs for their children to go to.

But I think something like economic
growth being high, which is partly

about urban centers creating things
to sell and buy around the world-

Aria Schrecker: Also would we have got the
Haber-Bosch process without urban centers?

Ben Southwood: Yeah.

Aria Schrecker: -Loads of questions
like that end up existing.

Ben Southwood: Exactly.

And like a lot of the things about
urban po- Like, rural population

growth was in continental Europe
to some extent hemmed in by death

before, before the 19th century, and
still after then in lots of places.

So it might have been that the people
would have just died and not been able to

move to the cities if the ur- So I think,
I feel like it's interlinked a bit more

than just it being a background feature,
although that clearly is relevant.

It's, something would have happened,
but I don't think it had to happen

the way it did and probably the
institutions were a part of the

story about how they pulled it off.

Samuel Hughes: The other thing
to say is, urban growth is

outstripping population growth.

So the average size of a home
falls steadily in the 19th century.

I think rough- You know, in the start,
when Queen Victoria comes to the

throne, the average British family
is probably, has about five kids,

and they're living in probably two
rooms, and they, you know, without any

running water or utilities whatsoever

Aria Schrecker: That's
exactly how my mother grew up.

Samuel Hughes: Is that right?

Aria Schrecker: Five kids, two rooms.

Samuel Hughes: Five kids, two rooms.

Well, and I mean, India's probably
undergoing change at a similar

rate to Victorian England.

By the time of her death, the average
family's living in four or five rooms,

and they'd dropped to probably three
kids, which is probably not wildly

far off at least southern India today.

So it's-

Aria Schrecker: Oh,
no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's way lower.

Yeah.

They're having, they're having
one child in south India.

Samuel Hughes: There you are.

Yeah, so it's, so huge improvement in
housing quality at the same time as an

enormous increase in urban population.

And also the thing that Ben mentioned
earlier, the share of public

space is rising in these cities.

They've got larger streets,
more- they didn't, cities in

1830 barely have public parks.

By the end of the, by the First
World War, they've got lots of public

parks, lots more public buildings.

A city of 1800, very, very
highly privatized space.

You've got roads and churches.

That's basically your public
sphere, and then nearly everything

else is houses and shops, I guess.

A much wider range of public
buildings that have, that have

appeared by the end of the century.

Ben Southwood: And to be honest,
shops, presumably many fewer.

There'd be lots of, poor people
might buy things from the

street, from street sellers.

Rich people would have stuff
delivered to their house and

made by their internal servants.

So there weren't that
many public shop spaces.

retail isn't really a thing.

And you can see this in poorer
countries today, that there

aren't many retail spaces.

Very rich people get a lot of stuff made
in-house and delivered to them, and very

poor people buy from street sellers.

But there isn't much of a, if you go
to the big cities of the developing

world, they often don't have large
shopping districts, or there isn't

that area that's that color in Google
Maps of go here, there are retail bits.

That doesn't exist in lots of, middle
and low-income cities to the same extent.

Samuel Hughes: I mean, there were
cert- there were certainly markets in

European cities and market streets,
but stuff like a department store

is a 19th century invention and
was a huge deal when it appeared.

And yeah, so that was, was part
of the creation of public space.

So

vast populations living in bigger homes
and with more public spaces to enjoy.

So tremendous rate of building
that underlies this, far greater

than Western cities see today,
comparable to what fast-growing

developing world cities see today.

Ben Southwood: If you were in New York
or something, you were building 10

elevated railway lines, which then turn
into 10 subway lines or whatever, plus

10 heavy rail lines, plus 50, tram lines,
plus building up a huge bus system.

Plus you were building up like hundreds
of pipelines of gas and building coal

in crazy amounts and building the
steam network, and building houses

at a much, much faster rate than
built today, all at the same time.

Samuel Hughes: I mean, the developing
world comparison is interesting, right?

Because people ask me after
this, after I worked on this.

'Okay, so what?

Can we go back to this?' And for Western
countries, it's like, yes, maybe in parts,

but politics are extremely complicated.

Lots of these institutions are very hard
to get back to once you've lost them.

And like we all- we've talked a lot
before about NIMBYism and where it

comes from and how strong it is and how
deep its roots are in modern societies.

Developing world cities are often growing
at the same rate as 19th century European

cities, and they do have sporadic
tremendous successes on infrastructure,

like the huge wave of Asian metros that
have been built in the last 25 years.

But there are also, we ran a piece
by Sartek Gupta on road share in

developing world cities, which
is drastically lower than it was

in 19th century European cities.

Extremely strangely, given that the number
of cars that exist in private vehicles

that exist in the developing world today
is far greater than the number of private

vehicles that existed in the 19th century.

Ben Southwood: European planners
didn't even have the bicycle

to contend with in most cases.

Right.

Yeah.

It hadn't been invented yet, let
alone the bicycle, moped, motorcycle,

car- and all these other things.

They just had carts, which outside of
the Americas were very rare and less

than 10% of people had access to one.

In the US strangely
enough, horse ownership.

I like to say this is like a
real Ben Southwood canard, is I

like to say that car ownership
has always been high in the USA.

And what I mean by that is that
horse and cart ownership was so

dramatically higher than in Europe-

Samuel Hughes: Is that right?

Ben Southwood: That, I think
it was visible in their cities,

a long time before you see
the effects of car ownership.

And the key way in which you see it is
that if you look at these New England

towns built in the 1600s and 1700s,
if they had been built in Europe,

every house would have been adjoined.

Everyone would have minimized the
amount of space that you expect.

If you look at planned towns from Europe
in the 1600s, like Richelieu in France

or what was that, earthquake destroyed
replanned Baroque city in Sicily?

But, we could come up with a name
if we thought about it hard enough.

All of these cities are built around
the idea that you are going to need

to walk to where you're going if
you're 95% of people, and therefore we

should minimize the distance between
where you're going and you -Whereas

these American towns, people would
build their farmhouses basically

isolated even in 1600 and 1700, right?

It doesn't matter how far back you go,
they're still building detached houses.

And I'm just, my hypothesis is
that this is because of a very high

rate of horse and cart ownership,
which is about a quarter of people

had access to a horse and cart.

Aria Schrecker: So why did they
have so many horses, so many carts?

Ben Southwood: Because the population
density was so low that you could use land

around towns and cities for fodder growth,
so clover and alfalfa and stuff like that.

And just feed it to your horses.

And interestingly enough, this means
that when the car is developed in

the US, and car ownership does go up,
about, some size, like hundreds of

millions of acres are reforested after
that point because it's previously

required to be, alfalfa or clover
growth, and then it can be reforested

to become leisure forests for Americans.

Samuel Hughes: So the forests that
surround the cities of New England would

previously chiefly have been horse fodder?

Ben Southwood: Horse fodder
until the early 20th century.

Enormous amounts of horse fodder
everywhere, and so the car actually led

to much more land going back to nature,
even though, of course, it led to lots

of roads and all those sorts of things.

Aria Schrecker: I have another question,
which is, okay, so almost all the

European and American cities, and I guess

Australia as well, put lots of land aside

Aria Schrecker: for roads.

But the developing world cities
now, even though they have the

information about how good roads
are, don't seem to be doing this.

Do we have a good story
about why that's happened?

Ben Southwood: So if Sarthak were here,
I think he would say, he would say this

in a much more reasonable, nuanced,
and balanced way that I'm about to do.

But because I'm speaking for him,
I can just say it in like a really

reductionist and unreasonable way.

But I think he would say that they get
very bad advice from international elites.

International elites are thinking about
what are the problems that Western cities

are facing now, and one of those problems
is that those cities were not built

for the car and then got invaded by the
car and have only partly reconfigured

themselves to have both the benefits of
cars and avoid most of their downsides.

And so they're very fixated on the
downsides of cars specifically,

not thinking, I think, about
the fact that you can't just

jump to being Denmark or Sweden.

There are often stages
you need to go through.

So what Sarthak argues that they should
do is set aside wide alignments, accept

that in the short run, motorcycles,
mopeds, bicycles, cars, we'll use

them in a fairly unplanned way, and
then recognize that in the late 19th

century, Manhattan, New York City,
was building out its railway network.

And one thing that, one thing
that any British person feels when

they go around New York subway is
that it's extremely squalid and

like why is it so, so it-
so degraded and decayed?

But another thing they

Ben Southwood: think is that, wow,
these express trains are sure are

great, and you can skip stops and on the
same network and jump off one onto the

other, and there can be cross-platform
exchanges, and you can run like, 'How

come we, how come we can't do this?'

And the reason we can't do this is
because we had to tunnel bore most of our

network, which means that the wider your
bore is increasing like in the square

of its diameter or more than the square.

So you, like you want
to minimize the bore.

So you have these horrible tiny little
Victoria Line trains, that, you squeeze

onto and everyone's, whereas the subway is
just dug under an extremely wide street.

And like, well, we could
put four tracks here.

Hey, like some streets they could
put, probably put six tracks.

So that's a big advantage that you have.

And there's a general point
there, which is that, yes, you may

start out with a wide street full
of crowded motorcycle traffic.

Maybe this is something
you'd like tuk-tuks

even or, rickshaws and
jitneys and stuff going

Ben Southwood: through, and maybe
this is something you don't want.

But you can always turn that if
you have it into something else.

If you don't have it's
very hard to get it later.

It's very hard to, pulling off Haussmann
and the Metropolitan Board of Works

and cutting a road is really hard.

The Egyptians would love to do it through
their cities, and they occasionally

achieve it against kicking and
screaming of thousands and thousands

of people, and they'd love to have
more rights of way, but they don't.

Aria Schrecker: I'm guessing also
they haven't had generations and

generations of primogeniture the same
way we did when we were doing this.

So also they've got way more fractured
land ownership already that is

making the political problem harder.

Ben Southwood: I mean, fractured
land ownership is basically a

universal world problem that a
tiny number of countries, basically

England- and then Britain have got.

because not, it's not Britain
originally because I believe that

Scottish inheritance was more
likely to follow Roman partibility.

So although actually it was
concentrated for other reasons,

so I don't, I actually don't know
the story of Scotland very well.

But it's not necessarily
an, a Britain thing.

But England did get around
this problem, and some other

countries in the world have.

And then some other countries, this is a
big research thing that Works in Progress

is interested in because countries have
solved this problem in amazing ways.

So for example, the Eastern Indian
Punjab in 1947 was thought that

the parliament was basically just
representatives of the farmers.

Everyone is a farmer.

And they decided let's once and for
all, we've got this once in a lifetime

chance to reorganize all of our land
into nice even squares instead of having

plots spread across a bunch of places,
and they just did it in one big blast.

And they also banned redividing
it under a certain size.

and now the Punjab has beautifully
squared land across all its territory,

and it's visible from space that its
cities expand in, reasoned districts,

in one go because the land, you can get
a whole, and plan a whole neighborhood.

Whereas literally the rest of the
entire subcontinent, except for the

Punjab, it just has the development
pattern we were talking about

earlier- like Southern Italy or

Poland, where you have
arterial streets built

Ben Southwood: by the authorities
and everyone just adds-

Aria Schrecker: Yeah.

- Ben Southwood: Like little cul-de-sacs
on there which add, which build

road, but don't add any capacity.

Instead, and like the Punjab solved
this, but very few places have.

Aria Schrecker: Are you on the
side of Stalin against the Kulaks?

Ben Southwood: I don't think so.

But I do think there's an
interesting story there, which is

that the exact same problem existed
in Russia in the early 1900s.

And Pyotr Stolypin, who was their last
hope before the communist revolution,

he was a conservative, but also a
reformer and thought 'Our country is

going to fall apart, if we don't reform
our economy, society, et cetera.'

Obviously, 70% of the economy
is agriculture, so there's

the first place to go.

Funnily enough, the farm in Russia at
the time is still run basically along

the medieval, collective farm model.

Like the medieval manor.

So-

Samuel Hughes: Like the
cowocracy of Nottingham.

Ben Southwood: Everyone owns strips
of land spread across all the big

fields, which are good in a sense
because it means that if you have a bad

harvest in one field, you are insured
by having in all the other fields.

But bad in another sense because if
you farm only your own plots, you're

moving your plow between all these
places, and spending loads of time.

And so he tried to solve this problem
and consolidate the farms into the

things which became the Kulaks later.

Well, to at least some
extent, very related.

And funnily enough, he used a method where
you had to get two-thirds of the farmers

to agree, and millions of petitions went
in to do this- before they closed it off

a few years later when the war started.

But even in the time when they were
doing it turned Russia into the

world's top grain exporter because
letting people consolidate their

farms was so much more efficient.

So I think I would've been on the
side of the Kulaks, but I think

that there wa- Stalin had a point,
which was that they hadn't finished

reforming Soviet agriculture.

He just had the exact wrong idea and sent
it in the wrong direction, in my opinion.

Samuel Hughes: Other stuff, other
reasons why 19th century successes aren't

replicated- So for the monopoly model,
you need to have- So the monopolists

need to have quite a lot of com- So
one issue, so the monopolists all got

price controlled in the 19th century,
in order to stop, they were allowed to

use their monopoly powers to extract
some somewhat higher revenues, like

their prices could go up higher than
they would be under competition.

But they didn't allow them to just
charge whatever prices they liked.

And the usual rule was once they
had paid off the undertaking debt,

the debt required to build the stuff
in the first place, then the prices

would have to come down after a while.

They were allowed to make a profit,
but they weren't allowed to make

like endless super economic profit.

And 19th century governments were mostly
fairly good at not, like they would

price control, but they wouldn't price
control so severely as to undermine

the investment for future investors
to build future infrastructure or

undermine investment to maintain
and upgrade existing infrastructure.

There's two reasons for this.

One is there was no inflation in the
19th century, so they didn't have the

issue that societies have with inflation,
which is that you constantly have to

push up your price controls, and you
have a new renewed battle with the

public and renewed like rumpus about,
oh, is- transport's just becoming

more expensive, the cost of these.

And the other was they did just
have a background political culture

that was extremely sympathetic
to private property rights.

So for both Western and
non-Western jurisdictions today,

like neither of those obtains.

We now, all countries I assume,
have inflation most of the time.

And like almost no, like nowhere except
maybe Japan has 19th century respect

for private property in the same way
and the belief that like, no, it's

okay for these guys do own this right.

We just definitely, definitely gotta
make them make a load of money from it.

That's fine.

so that's That's one of the reasons
that monopolism, two of the reasons

that monopolism is hard to recreate.

But the roads thing is still
a bit of a puzzle to me.

I don't, I still don't quite understand
why it was that 19th century governments

were so generous in their endowment of
public space, and how governments later

find it so hard to get close to that.

Ben Southwood: Yeah,
I don't, I don't know.

I think we can find some examples of
developing country cities basically

doing this kind of planning.

Samuel Hughes: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Ben Southwood: With negatives.

it's not always perfect, but I don't know
how to pronounce it, but Gurgaon, outside

New Delhi, and New Cairo, and there are,

they're in Marrakesh and
Casablanca, there are

Ben Southwood: examples in Morocco.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, Malaysia.

Ben Southwood: So you see
examples around the world.

They don't, they're not always nice
in every respect- but they often

do plan out large public spaces.

It does happen, but it seems to take a lot
of directed effort rather than being the

default thing that local governments do.

I mean, one possibility is just that
local government never got a strong

of a hold in the non-European rooted
places in the world, because it

doesn't have as deep of a tradition.

And so we need to create more of it.

Arjun Ramani at The Economist, or was
at The Economist when he told me this,

he always argued that India not having
a deep tradition of local government

was undermining its local government
effectiveness in the modern day, and

they needed to create more local
government that wasn't appointed by

the states, and instead was an actual
local government representing the local

people and let them do things, including
things that they might disagree with.

I think that one thing we can say
with your inflation point is that,

the kind of classic local government
of the past that existed in lots and

lots of different countries around the
world basically died after the First

World War to at least some extent.

Like in Britain, you get price controls
on lots of the things they sell.

You get much more controversy about
the way they're working, all after the

big inflation that happens during the
First World War that isn't return- it,

that doesn't get wiped away afterwards.

And you see kind of the similar thing
in lots of different countries, right?

Samuel Hughes: So the whole, like all
across the world, public transport

moves into financial crisis in the
1910s, and lots of public transport

systems go bankrupt or are on the
verge of bankruptcy in the interwar

period, just as cars start to come in.

This is also happens with utilities
to some extent, but I think ultimately

utilities are so often, so obviously
vital that they do eventually raise

prices, and utility systems generally
remain viable around the world.

But public transport doesn't have the
same level of political protection,

so it's totally stricken by that.

Then you start getting, I mean, one
of the things we for- a forgotten

episode is that nationalization
after the Second World War did not

just affect privately owned assets.

It also affected municipally owned assets.

So in Britain, transport and utilities
mostly end up getting nationalized.

But about half of them were already
owned by local government, so they were

being seized from the local government
by the national gov- And that's another

kind of a strange episode of 20th
century history where an older, not

necessarily, like old tradition of
municipal socialism is replaced by a

tradition of like nationalized socialism.

Ben Southwood: What word
are you thinking of there?

So what you would say is that-

Samuel Hughes: Central

government socialism.

Ben Southwood: There's also the converse
story, which is quite interesting,

which is that Lots of privatizations
in various countries are privatizations

of local stuff as well, right?

So they take things that are being
run locally and then force, force

them out into the private sector.

And instead of, It's not just national
project, it's also local project.

Yeah.

So for example, in the UK, buses
get deregulated- Right, which

means that anyone can run a bus.

Samuel Hughes: Buses go back to
being a pre-monopolism system.

It's a very curious thing,
the history of English buses.

They most things are on this trajectory
towards being funded through controlled

by the national government and funded
through central taxation or controlled

nominally by local government, but
tightly, you know, what they do is

controlled heavily by national government.

But then there's this strange story
of the bus system, which is plunged

back into a hoteling problem, like
under supply or under supply early 19th

century kind of model of infrastructure
provision, and does indeed work badly

as, except in London, where it remains
under a kind of German style run by

the city system and works much better.

Ben Southwood: Yeah, there are funny bus
wars that you see in the Darlington Bus

War when everyone is racing to try and
get the passengers, which is exactly what

municipal socialists of the 1800s said.

They all race to try
and get the passengers.

They all clog up what the efficient
routes, but then don't do any of the

feeder routes, which makes them all
less profitable, but then no one has

any incentive to do the feeder routes.

Samuel Hughes: So Britain

has been reliving, the
experience of mid-19th century,

like British local government

Samuel Hughes: in the late 20th and early
21st century, having rerun privatization

of the bus system, and now we're
gradually municipalizing it again, right?

Ben Southwood: Yeah.

So they've given them the power,
and it's, different cities are

taking it over steadily over time.

They generally seem to want to do it.

Samuel Hughes: So there's a- one
tendency towards privatizing local

government services, one towards
nationalizing them, one to running

them down through price controls.

You get tendencies, tendencies to take
away fiscal responsibility from local

government so they don't, they're
not able to raise money, they're

not able to control their own taxes.

What they can do is more tightly
controlled by national governments.

So in all sorts of different ways, these
like very powerful government, powerful

and responsible local governments of the
19th century get kind of pulled apart and

undermined in 20th century jurisdictions.

And then in other, I mean it'd be
interesting to do a proper international

study of this, but as Ben says, I think
there's lots of jurisdictions around the

world which just have never had a strong
tradition of local government, and local

government's not seen as having the
same legitimacy, doesn't have the same

competence, it can't deliver the same.

And so that it may be, I mean,

inflation's not going away,
expropriatory attitudes

Samuel Hughes: towards private
companies or whatever aren't going away.

But it might be that we could get
quite a lot closer to some of the

successes of 19th century cities by
looking carefully at local government

and how to make it work again.

Aria Schrecker: Last time the
three of us gathered on the

podcast, we talked about why newer

buildings are ugly now.

Is part of the reason,
all of these 19th century

Aria Schrecker: buildings were so
beautiful is because of this kind

of socialist or monopolistic system?

Samuel Hughes: Well, that was what,
while I was writing about this, and

I was talking about what regulations
did they have on buildings.

They had some height regulations justified
rightly or wrongly through reference to

externalities like fire and light for
the street and, these kinds of- they

had lots of fire regulations generally
and building safety regulations.

Aria Schrecker: You have an
interesting example of New York

not having those light regulations.

And so New York ends up very, very tall,
and then people, I think, they have to

have windows, but those windows don't
necessarily have to shine out anywhere.

So you have those weird little grids,
where people have window- And you see

this on sitcoms that are set in New York,
where the background of people's houses

will sometimes be they're looking out
onto someone else's wall and fire escape.

Samuel Hughes: This is, So
this is a different phenomenon.

This is the- So New York allows originally
100% plot coverage- and they have, so

whole city blocks get built over solid
with a little veneer of daylighted rooms

around the side and then masses of rooms-

Aria Schrecker: So you have
very, very valuable rooms-

Samuel Hughes: -that aren't
daylighted in the middle.

I mean, it's all fairly valuable
because otherwise they would have

put some courtyards in, but it's
not valuable enough to, So the,

and then they start introducing rules,
that say, no, you need to have some

kind of daylight to different rooms.

But the rules are very lax.

So the first version of the rules
allows you to have windows between

rooms as a way of satisfying this.

So they don't change the plan at all.

They just introduce windows between
their rooms so that if you're in the

middl of the building, you might just be
able to look through a whole enfilade of

windows and see a remote window to the
outside of the edge of the city block.

Then they start, the rules get
slightly tightened, and they say every

inhabited room has to have its own
window to the outside, but they don't

specify what the, how much volume
of the outside there needs to be.

So they make these tiny light shafts
and put masses of windows, looking onto

them so they can technically satisfy it.

Aria Schrecker: I guess whole block
coverage works for office buildings.

You see it quite often with
office buildings, and I guess

that's just because people don't
really need to divide the room up.

So it's probably part of the reason
we have lots of open plan offices.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah.

It's also because people are, seem
to be much more tolerant, or at least

their employers are tolerant of them
not having daylight in their offices.

People are very tolerant of having
fluorescent lighting in offices.

Ben Southwood: You only go in
the daytime as well, right?

So it's not, it's not as bad.

Samuel Hughes: You can also
have very cold light in offices.

So if you look in, the kelvin of a
light in most offices is way beyond

what anyone uses in a domestic context.

And that's because in daytime that's fine.

You don't mind having
cold light in the daytime.

That makes you work a a bit
more efficiently and so forth.

Whereas if you, you wouldn't want to
live in the evening under kelvins,

you want to live under a warmer light.

Ben Southwood: Anyway, East Berlin has
better streetlights than West Berlin-

Samuel Hughes: That's right.

Office blocks still today,
you're exactly correct.

Office blocks today still often have
a block usage that's very similar to

those of 19th century New York blocks.

They often fill in the middle
and build over the whole thing

with a gigantic floor plate.

but in those days they don't
have electric, or they have very

primitive kinds of electric lighting.

They don't have modern ventilation, and
these are often residential, not offices.

So they are indeed quite dismal
spaces that they create in the

interior parts of these blocks.

The authorities then very
slowly regulate to remove that.

That's not actually an externality
based kind of regulation.

They're just regulating there because
people find unpalatable the idea

of other human beings living under-

Aria Schrecker: Other people
are forced to live in them.

Samuel Hughes: And you know, if one were
to be like a purist economist about it,

you would point out, like- Actually,
when you cut out this space for the light

wells, you're cutting out space that
would otherwise have been people's homes.

And the reason why that space
was previously being filled with

home rather than with light well
was because people value home

more than they value light wells.

So in fact, it was probably value
maximizing to build in the way

that the industry was building
before the regulations came in.

Most of us- you, if you look at these
buildings, it's quite hard to hold

the line on economic principle there
because they do look pretty ferocious.

But-

Aria Schrecker: I was at a very wealthy
person's house a couple of days ago,

and they have a normal house sort
of sitting on top of the plot, and

then five or six stories of basement.

And the five or six stories of
basement is actually pretty sick.

Samuel Hughes: Yeah, that's true, but
we should remember the great gift of

modern electric lighting and ventilation
which does make all these spaces, a space

that was not, that was more than 30 foot
from the facade wasn't considered to

be rentable office space in New York.

It could put poor housing in it, but not
rentable office space in New York until

the 1930s, I think, because that was
when they invented fluorescent lights,

and suddenly they became much lighter.

But early-

Aria Schrecker: I've just realized
we're in a room with no real windows.

We've got a fake window.

Samuel Hughes: But we do have, so
the case of the New York, light

wells is actually an eccentricity
for 19th century regulation,

where it's not externality based.

But in a way it also goes to the point,
which is that it was only this extreme

case where very, very light touch,
non-externality based regulations kicked

in, where it's kind of paternalistic
rules, where the government's saying,

'No, we just want you to have this nicer
product, so we're going to impose a

rule saying,' Nearly all the regulations
could be justified by the effect that one

property owner had on another property
owner when they did a certain thing,

and if it was a harmful effect, the
government might step in to block it.

So while I was working on this, Ben
says, 'Oh, well, it'd be extremely neat

for your theory if it turned out that
the aesthetics of 19th century cities

were also the result of this kind of
externality based intervention.' The

government was like, 'When you have an
ugly facade of a building, you destroy the

value of all the neighbors, so we're going
to step in and stop you from doing that.'

And that would cohere completely
with the general theory that I'm

giving about 19th century regulation.

Unfortunately for me, this is
just not true at all really.

They had almost no, public regulation for
aesthetic character in the 19th century.

They did, the governments had aesthetic
ideas, so when they compulsorily purchased

land, like in Paris for the famous
boulevards, or in parts of, London in the

same way, the state would then impose,
it would sell off the land to developers

and it would impose rules on what the
developers could do and it would, you

know, say, 'No, we want this street to
have a uniform facades and you need to

use this kind of stone and it use, needs
to use these details.' They could become

quite, you know pernickety about it.

But that was only in acting in
their capacity as a landowner, not

in their capacity as a regulator.

In capacity as a regulator, it's like
structural integrity, fire safety,

and then occasionally these in these
extreme cases, compassion-based

interventions to stop gruesome kinds of-

Aria Schrecker: Poor children
growing up never seeing daylight.

Samuel Hughes: Never seeing daylight.

But not

regulation on beautiful facades and
you could have made a building that

was pretty much as ugly as you liked
in the 19th century and the state

would have been silent on the matter.

So the we are returned back to the things
we've discussed in previous podcasts,

like the beautiful facades of 19th century
building and all the money that they

put into it, that was a result of demand
from buyers for this, despite the fact

that they were much poorer than we are.

And they did, they were just prepared
to sacrifice, add a little bit to their

build costs in order to enhance the public
aspect of the building and to benefit

all of their neighbors in this way.

So that's leads on into a whole
interesting topic, but also sits somewhat

outside the main thing that I've been
researching on 19th century cities, which

is how successful their regulation was.

Ben Southwood: So I think the
conclusion we've come to is that the

cities of the 19th century were built
so fast and so well in terms of lots

of public space and everyone getting
more space per capita and excellent

infrastructure, in part because of
their features that we don't have today.

People could build pretty
much whatever they wanted.

Infrastructure was provided more
than was needed, and people paid

for most of their public services
at a rate that covered their costs.

So more public services did not
cost the public purse any more.

I think we also have come to
the view that bringing some of

these back is probably desirable.

In terms of building freedom,
that's pretty much what we

work on a lot of our time.

We have lots of friends who work on
the building freedom element, and

I wish them best of luck because
I think it's very important.

And in terms of building
better infrastructure, that's

another important thing.

But I think the less discussed thing
is giving local governments some of

the powers that they had in the past,
some of the responsibilities, some

of the powers, treating them more
like companies and less like just-

Samuel Hughes: Agencies of
the national government?

Ben Southwood: Agencies of
the national government.

Exactly.

And in some countries today, to be clear,
that is already the case, and I might make

the case that that's one of the reasons
why they, most of those countries are more

successful than Britain at building homes.

And one surprising thing is that the
beauty of 19th century cities is still,

as far as we can tell, a mystery.

People wanted it and were willing to pay
for it, and we don't know exactly why.

Thank you for listening to
the Works in Progress podcast.

I'm Ben Southwood, one of the editors
of Works in Progress, and I was here

with Aria Schrecker, another editor,
and Samuel Hughes, yet another editor.

Thank you.