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.