‘I think it would be easier if, instead of doing rounds and rounds of paperwork, we just stuffed people’s mouths with gold, but told them they don’t get a choice – it’s happening. I feel that’s what the French would do, and they are better at building stuff than we are.’
This week on The Capitalist, I spoke to the writer and CapX columnist Jonn Elledge. His new book ‘31 Inventions That Built Our World’, surveys the technologies – from sewers to lifts – that make urban life possible. We discussed what it takes to keep a modern city running, and whether we are losing our nerve when it comes to building twenty-first century infrastructure.
We also talked about the PT Barnum stunt that convinced the public it was safe to ride in a lift, why nowhere on Earth held more than about a million people until the 1800s, the speed limit that stood in the way of commuting and why market pricing – not more regulation – is the answer to the mess we’ve made of urban space.
Below, you’ll find some short excerpts from our conversation.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
How Britain can get more built:
‘My instinct is that this country would probably over-consult and under-compensate. I think it would be easier if, instead of doing rounds and rounds of paperwork, we just stuffed people's mouths with gold, but told them they don't get a choice – it's happening. I feel that's what the French would do, and they are better at building stuff than we are... I don't think it's entirely unreasonable that we give people some compensation. But we should do that while also saying: you don't get a veto on national infrastructure.’
How lifts made skyscrapers possible:
‘One of the real problems with having a very tall building is how on earth you get up and down it, because the stairs are exhausting to climb. So lifts, and getting people to feel safe travelling in them, were essential – without that, you basically can’t do tall buildings. And steel-frame construction isn’t the only thing you need. There’s also the steam pump. It’s not until you have steam pumps that you can put water under pressure in a way that means you can get it to flow upward. Before that, if you wanted water at the top of a tall building, you were literally carrying it up – and even in slave societies, that’s exhausting work.’
On the size limit of cities before the 1800s:
‘For a lot of history, 10,000 people would be a huge city – 50,000 would be enormous. Ancient Rome, medieval Baghdad, early modern Paris, London in about 1800, probably all hit around a million. But that’s about the most people you can get in a place, because beyond that it just doesn’t function – people are too far from the food supply, and you get too much waste. It’s only with the Industrial Revolution that you suddenly get more than that in a single place, because the economy is functioning differently, and because you have different sorts of transport systems starting to come on stream.’
Do our cities give cars a free ride?:
‘Cars are a good example of externalities at work – we don’t charge people for their use of road space or parking, both of which are scarce resources. So I think you can solve a lot of these problems without fundamentally attacking people’s freedom of movement, just by introducing market signals. … Road pricing is difficult politically rather than economically.’
The truth behind the LA streetcar conspiracy:
‘Los Angeles had one of the best urban transport networks in the world – the red cars and the yellow cars, one running through downtown, one connecting the city to its suburbs. That’s how Los Angeles grew: around public transport. The version of the story in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ is that a conspiracy of motor industry interests bought up the streetcar network and ripped it out so they could sell more cars and build more freeways. That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s mostly untrue. There was a conspiracy – but it was actually about selling tyres. The reason streetcars failed as a technology in the mid-20th century is that they looked incredibly backward. They were a product of the 19th century, and cars were coming in and were a sign of wealth.’
