Victorian City Planning

 Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress writes about urban planning in Europe and America Many Victorian Cities Grew Tenfold in a Century. 

This sluggish growth rate (Ed. today) has generated intense housing shortages. Tackling them may require learning from the city planners of the nineteenth century. The whirlwind pace of nineteenth-century expansion was underpinned by a distinctive approach to urban government, including a fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so, tolerance and even mandating of infrastructure monopolies, and willingness to charge fees at profit-making levels to fund urban infrastructure, whether sewerage, water, buses, trams, metros, gas, or electricity.

The illustrations alone are worth going over and wading through a long article. The followup a few days later How writing about nineteenth-century cities changed my mind,  was what actually attracted me to the first essay.  The words "changed my mind" are like catnip to me.  It is so hard for all of us to change any belief that the arguments in such essays are likely to be surprising and powerful. It is the intellectual equivalent of hiking up a mountain with a fire tower, at least in New England. Those spots were chosen for wide visibility but easy access for a fire warden to live there, so you get a lot of view for moderate effort.

1. It made me more pro-planning

Living in 2020s Britain, it is easy to become sceptical about planning. Our planning system enormously constricts housing supply, impoverishing the country. The housing and industrial buildings that do get built are often distributed around the country according to political imperatives rather than economic logic. It is natural to think that some sort of Hayekian emergent order would be preferable.

In the nineteenth century, however, we see planning performing its true function, solving the collective action problems inherent in urban life...

So for moderate effort, I actually feel I know something about the topic.  That is probably an illusion, but still, it's a nice feeling.