The Victorian Blueprint That Modern Cities Forgot
Samuel Hughes, writing for Works in Progress, delivers a sweeping institutional history of nineteenth-century urban growth that doubles as a pointed critique of contemporary housing and planning policy. The numbers alone are staggering: Berlin's metropolitan area grew twentyfold between 1800 and 1914, Manchester's twenty-fivefold, and Chicago's population doubled on average every five years. What makes the piece distinctive is its refusal to treat this expansion as a simple triumph of laissez-faire capitalism. Hughes argues instead that Victorian cities grew so explosively because of a specific, now-abandoned regulatory architecture -- one that aligned private profit with public infrastructure in ways that modern governments have largely failed to replicate.
If we were to specify one unifying virtue of nineteenth-century urban governance, it would not be laissez-faire, but rather the alignment of private interests and public good.
Streets as Public Goods, Not Afterthoughts
The article's most counterintuitive section concerns the degree to which Victorian cities were planned. Hughes documents the "extension plans" that governed urban expansion across continental Europe and the United States -- maps drawn by municipal authorities dictating where future streets would run long before development arrived. The 1811 Commissioners' Plan for New York covered the entirety of Manhattan when only its southern tip was settled. Berlin, Madrid, Rome, and Milan followed similar models, with the German planner Josef Stubben drawing up extension plans for nearly a hundred cities.
Even where comprehensive plans did not exist, as in Britain and France, minimum street widths were rigorously enforced. London required all roads to be at least twelve meters wide. Berlin mandated twenty-two meters. New York's avenues were thirty meters. These widths were, as Hughes notes, "somewhat astonishing given that very few people in the nineteenth century owned private carriages." The generosity looks prescient now: those streets accommodate modern traffic, cycling infrastructure, and street parking without major reconstruction.
A World Bank study found that congestion in Cairo alone costs Egypt around 4 percent of its GDP, while a United Nations study estimated that congestion costs EU and American economies just 1.4 and 0.7 percent respectively.
The contrast with unplanned growth is vivid. Hughes describes early nineteenth-century Sheffield, where rapid expansion without municipal governance produced a "congested mass of narrow lanes, bizarrely shaped blocks and gloomy cul-de-sacs" in the city's north, while areas with unified land ownership developed coherent grids on their own. The lesson is not that markets cannot produce good streets, but that fragmented ownership almost guarantees they will not.
The Monopoly Solution
Perhaps the most provocative section addresses how Victorian cities financed infrastructure without public subsidies. Hughes identifies a common mechanism across different national systems: regulated monopoly. Whether through American-style franchises, French-style concessions, or German-style municipal ownership (Stadtwerke), cities granted single operators control over transit, gas, water, and electricity networks. In exchange, operators funded construction through user fees and were expected to turn a profit.
The economics were straightforward. Monopoly pricing allowed operators to charge fares high enough to cover capital costs, while municipal regulation prevented price gouging. Once the infrastructure debt was paid down, prices dropped. Hughes cites Boston, where gas prices were formally lowered in 1899 after companies had recovered their construction costs, and Glasgow, which steadily cut tram fares after paying off its undertaking debt in the 1910s.
The Metropolitan Street Railway Company, which ran Manhattan's trams, paid a seven percent dividend in the first decade of the twentieth century, while the Brooklyn Manhattan Transport Corporation, which ran Brooklyn and Queens's trams, turned a profit of up to $5 million annually, fantastically large by the standards of the time.
This system had obvious vulnerabilities. Hughes is candid about corruption -- Charles Yerkes, the man who built Chicago's tram network, had been jailed twice before entering the transit business and once prompted a riot outside City Hall when a bribed legislature tried to renew his franchise on sweetheart terms. But the system's fatal weakness turned out to be inflation. Nineteenth-century price stability meant franchise terms could hold for decades. When World War One ended the era of stable prices, controlled fares failed to keep pace with rising costs, and most transit systems entered a death spiral from which they never recovered.
Where the Counterarguments Bite
Hughes's account is compelling but not without significant gaps. The article largely brackets the human costs of Victorian urbanization. The tenements of Lower Manhattan, where entire city blocks were built with no interior light, receive a few paragraphs. The cholera epidemics that killed tens of thousands before sewerage systems were built are mentioned in passing. The article acknowledges that "many Europeans still lived in terrible housing poverty" in 1914 but frames this as a problem that was "rapidly shrinking" -- a characterization that would have surprised the residents of Berlin's notorious Mietskasernen or London's East End.
There is also a tension in the argument about building freedom. Hughes celebrates the fact that Victorian landowners had a "fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so," producing flat real house prices despite enormous population growth. But he also notes that privately covenanted neighborhoods -- where developers imposed restrictions on density and use -- commanded a premium, suggesting that "nineteenth-century governments were offering a level of development management below what would have been economically value-maximizing." In other words, even Victorian-era consumers sometimes wanted more regulation than they got, not less.
The article's treatment of beauty is similarly incomplete. Hughes argues that Victorian buildings were beautiful because their owners wanted them to be, not because regulations required it. This is true as far as it goes, but it sidesteps the question of why market demand for architectural beauty collapsed in the twentieth century. If people in 1880 voluntarily paid for ornament despite being far poorer than people in 1960, something other than regulatory change must explain the shift -- perhaps industrialized construction methods, perhaps modernist ideology, perhaps the severing of architecture from craft traditions. Hughes opens this door but does not walk through it.
The Housing Affordability Punchline
The article's most politically charged data point lands near the end. In 1850, the average British house cost about twelve times average earnings. By 1914, it had fallen to four times. By 2020, it had climbed back to nine times -- worse than it was in 1876. Hughes attributes roughly eighty percent of the postwar increase to restrictions on building imposed by public authorities, a figure drawn from broader economic research on land-use regulation and housing costs.
Despite the enormous increase in demand for urban housing caused by demographic and economic growth, real house prices remained roughly flat throughout the period. This is despite the average home becoming considerably larger and better built in the course of the century.
The implication is unmistakable: modern planning regimes have made housing more expensive without making cities appreciably better. Victorian cities, for all their squalor, were getting more affordable over time. Contemporary cities are doing the opposite. Hughes stops short of calling for wholesale deregulation -- he acknowledges that "the optimal level of development control is probably higher than that which prevailed in the nineteenth century" -- but his argument clearly favors a dramatic loosening of current restrictions.
Bottom Line
Hughes makes a serious case that the institutional architecture of Victorian urbanism -- not its technology, not its aesthetics, but its regulatory logic -- produced results that modern cities have failed to match. The key mechanisms were publicly planned street networks, self-funding infrastructure monopolies, and permissive building rights. Whether these can be transplanted into an era of inflation, democratic accountability, and entrenched homeowner interests is the question the article raises but cannot answer. What it does establish, with considerable evidence, is that the twentieth-century shift toward restrictive zoning, subsidized infrastructure, and fragmented planning has not been the improvement its architects intended.