Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress and an expert on architecture, urbanism, and planning.
“We treat age as the value, but often what people are really protecting is beauty—they just don’t want to admit that’s what matters most.”
We discuss the feasibility of mass-producing beautiful buildings through good materials and proportions, the decline of ornamented architecture, and why maintaining industrial skills matters for long-term infrastructure projects.
The conversation explores Japanese zoning and urbanism, the impact of culture and geography on city design, Berlin’s mix of rent control and street grids, and the idea of “gentle density.”
“Most individual buildings in Tokyo are pretty ugly, but the overall streetscape is often nicer than in Britain or America—urban form matters more than facades.”
Samuel also shares his views on greenbelt reform, the importance of mixed-use urban density, and how civic and institutional pride once shaped even the most mundane buildings.
“In the 19th century even pumping stations and hospitals were built to be attractive—today our institutions too often forget that civic pride shows in the architecture.”
We touch on underrated cities like Dresden and examine future solutions for Britain’s housing supply crisis.
“The real breakthrough will come when communities see that allowing development makes them richer—turning adversarial planning into a win-win.”
Finally, Samuel reflects on how policy research can meaningfully shape public infrastructure and urban planning.
Summary contents, transcript, and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Watch the video above or on YouTube.
Contents
01:02 Mass Producing Beautiful Buildings
01:43 The Decline of Ornament in Architecture
04:37 Tokyo’s Urban Design and Zoning
10:05 How Long Should Buildings Last? UK vs Japan
16:13 Philosophy, Beauty, and Emotions
25:53 Public Policy Trade-offs in Practice
31:41 Berlin: Rent Control and Urban Planning
36:32 Housing in Europe: A Historical Context
38:02 Modern Housing Markets and Trends
41:50 Rethinking the Greenbelt
44:40 Planning Authorities and Their Role
50:40 Overrated and Underrated Urban Ideas
1:02:03 Dresden: Lessons in Urban Reconstruction
1:05:03 The Future of Britain’s Housing Supply
1:08:40 Career Advice on Policy and Design
Transcript (AI assisted so mistakes possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm excited to be speaking to Samuel Hughes. Samuel is an editor at Works in Progress and has been involved with the Think Tank Center for Policy Studies and the Create Streets movement. He has worked in a number of roles around architecture, urbanism, and planning, and he posts prolifically on social media channels highlighting architecture and design.
Samuel, welcome.
In the UK or even globally. Can we still mass produce and build beautiful buildings?
Samuel: Yes we can. I mean, a beautiful building, like in a way it's not that difficult to build. You can do it with good materials, good proportions a bit of greenery, good urban form, that, that has never become that difficult.
There's some stuff, so I think I. One of the ways that people traditionally made buildings beautiful through the use of applied ornament of various kinds, that has become a bit tougher. Not because it's impossible to mass produce ornament. It's extremely easy to mass produce ornament. And we used to do it all the time, but because the mass production has stopped.
So I was talking to, um, some guys in Germany about this recently. They used to cover their buildings in, um, ornamented plaster, this automated plaster stucco work. And that was extremely cheap in the 19th century. The figure I've been told don't quite how reliable this is, but the figure I've been told is that it would add 15% to the sales value of a building and cost only 2% of the build cost.
So it was totally ubiquitous. But today, because they've stopped doing that for a hundred years and all the factories have closed and all the production chains have broken down, it's pretty expensive. It actually, actually does require expensive handicrafts today. Oddly there's been, for this particular good, there's been a technological regression over the last century as mass production has declined and handcrafts are now the only way you can do it.
So for that for that pathway to beauty, it's probably harder to mass produce it now and the costs have gone up. But that's, and that, that's an easy way of making beautiful things. That's a way in which, like, cheap job builders in the 19th century mass produce beautiful stuff without thinking about it too much.
But it's not the only way to make beautiful stuff. And you could find lots of like clever designers today who make beautiful buildings without use of applied ornament.
Ben: It's really interesting that we have, this is one of the arguments for industrial strategy or keeping industrial processes that in and itself might not be adding as much value.
But once you lose the workforce or the skills. It can be quite hard to gain back. And then you lose all of these other second order effects that they sort of say the same in in long term construction projects and in infrastructure. There is a, there's a technical level of skill which is useful to keep in the workforce even if they may not be as productive.
Samuel: Yeah, I had never thought of that connection, but that is, I mean, yeah, that's correct. That's true. Yeah. It's, um, and there are a few cases, so like there's one factory, maybe there's two factor, two small factories that still do cast stone ornament. So it's basically a kind of crush stone. You mix it with a little bit of, of, uh, cement and it looks remarkably similar to stone is much cheaper than this kind of card stone.
And I think there was one of those factories survived through the 20th century doing basically garden ornaments because people never completely stopped buying like little statues of nymphs or whatever to put in their gardens. And now, now that classical architecture has revived a bit in, in Britain.
They're mass producing quite a lot of, they, they do work for like the, um, the little towns that the king has patronized, poundbury, and sedan. But they survived through the drought years making little garden statue statues. That wasn't an industrial strategy, but it is an example where like the survival of something in a special way then meant that like a little body of skills and infrastructure was still in place, ready to be scaled up when demand for the, uh, for the primary good returned.
Ben: Yeah.
Samuel: Yeah. Very interesting.
Ben: I think you have once lived and researched in Tokyo or in Japan. What did you learn about Japanese zoning or Japanese building and, and culture and planning, either firsthand or, I know also there's been some work, uh, come through works in progress on thinking about Japanese design.
Samuel: Well, there's a lot to say. I mean, it's an amazing Japanese cities are. Basically like the type, they've got lots of problems, they've got lots of flaws there. But overall, they are basically like the Titanic success story of the 20th century cities with amazing infrastructure and with mixing of use and with, in their funny way, like high quality public space and the flourishing street life and all the rest.
But what can I say about, I think you will notice when you are in Japan, here's one starting point. Most built individual buildings in Tokyo or any, any Japanese city except Kyoto, are pretty ugly. Like they're actually worse than the average building in a, in Britain or in the United States.
But the overall effect they have, like the overall environment of walking down your average Tokyo Street is generally a lot nicer than the. Characteristic the average street in Britain or North America because of the urban density, the way the streetscape is defined, the quality of public space, the lack of car domination the, and the sort of richness and interest of urban life in Japan.
And so it does, it is the great example in favor of, this, the idea that urban form is more important than facades. I'm famous for thinking facades are quite important. I may, I really annoy people by going on, but, but like the example of Tokyo shows that although I, you know, yes, for sales matter, yes, Japanese cities probably would be nicer if they were prettier, but like you, they have basically created wonderful flourishing places out of lots and lots of ugly buildings.
And that's an interesting thing that we should bear in mind in terms of the institutions that created it. They have fairly, they do have a zoning system and have had one since 1920s, I think pretty early on that they introduced one. But it's a fairly liberal zoning system, so they tend to allow a greater range of uses and a greater level of density.
Tokyo is famous for, it doesn't really, doesn't provide on street parking off street parking. People are allowed to provide it for themselves, but because land is so expensive, they generally don't, which is why car ownership is so low in, um, in Japan. When Tokyo and rural Japan, of course, everyone has cars transit, um, and amazingly good rail systems.
They've done this thing. I'm working on this at the moment, the, um. The system that we did with the Elizabeth Lion, with Thas link, where you take these old Victorian railway lines that run to the edge of the city center and then stop. Because in the 19th century, they didn't have the technology to tunnel them under.
And then you join them together and create an integrated metro system by basically mostly you're just reusing your old, like decrepit, Victorian suburban railways. But by linking them together, you make them more interconnected. You increase the frequency and capacity. Tokyo's done this to, I think, 35 suburban railways, so they've got the equivalent of, it depends exactly on how you count them, but something like 15 or 20 crossrails that they've, and this is part of the great secret of like why Tokyo's rail system is this extra, like the best in the world, this extraordinary monument.
So yeah, I mean, I could say there are many more things I could say about, about Japan, but like, it's a very fascinating example of how. Cities can be made to work, at least given the starting point that they had.
Ben: Yes. I, I think a lot of city design of things, policy and the like, uh, influencer obviously, but a lot of it seems to me culturally and geographic specific, like Japan has come that way through a series of events which you are essentially not really gonna replicate in a lot of other countries.
Yeah, and I agree. So walking around Tokyo and, and some other places I would agree that actually the facades in Tokyo are not. People would prefer a lot of the facades in London, but you're true, there's somehow urban design and a repetition of this. And in some ways it harks to the fact that the, you know, in this country, the Georgian box house or even the Victorian box house was a pretty box and they just replicated, I think you, uh, I picked up a tweet that you said or something, which, and I replicated maybe half a million or a million times.
That's right. And lo and behold, it actually you get a kind of more interesting facade. But for them, we would've called it at the time a kind of cookie cutter approach to that. And that's kind of interesting. But in Japan, I also fascinated by, they don't necessarily think that their buildings are gonna last a hundred or 200 years, even though a bunch of them have.
And part of that is thinking about earthquakes or wood and, and part of that cultural cultural aspect. And then this interlink with transport because the rail is brilliant, but it also interlinks with a very dense bus network as well when you go around Tokyo, which then allows you to have. No cars and these very cute, walkable community neighborhoods, of which there's a bazillion because Tokyo is actually, uh, amazingly large around that.
So it's the kind of interlinked policy with all of that. But I wonder about this idea about how long you think a building's going to last. 'cause also some of our new buildings here, because of really the technology we now embed in some new buildings, they maybe not thought of trying to last 500 years and 200 years even, of which obviously some of them.
So I dunno what you think about the length of lasting of your building and how we should think about that. And both Japan as an example of where they haven't necessarily thought about it being a, a really long time, although some of them do. And where we are in the uk a thing
Samuel: that I have often thought is we, so a thing I pointed out about, I often point out about Georgian architecture is.
It's relatively placeless. And it's mass reproduced. And it's boxy. So these three things that people always say about contemporary British house building, oh, they're like boxes that could be anywhere and they've been churned out, by this company. Those were all, those things were all totally true, maybe even more true of these extremely celebrated buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries where, you know, basically there's like one facade reproduced 500,000 times all over England.
And most, yeah, if, you know, if you really know the stuff, the details, like building regulations meant you've got slightly different buildings in Bristol to Liverpool to London, but they're very similar as similar over a long period of time and over, over space and then the like. So people there, I think they are landing on oh, it could be anywhere, or, oh, it's too boxy.
Or, oh, it's. Been mass produced and they're struggling to find what they really don't like about these buildings. And they've landed on those things, but those probably don't really explain what they dislike. A lot of the time what they really dislike is just the buildings are ugly, but ugliness is not seen as a like respectable thing to talk about.
Too subjective, it sounds a bit dated or whatever. So people don't want to name that as the thing that's gone wrong. And so they find these other things which are proxies for ugliness, and they focus on those. And I think they obviously ly sincere, they sincerely believe it's those things, but if you actually test their reactions in different cases, you realize that's not what's motivating them.
I think something like that can be true with some of this building to building to last stuff or some of this fascination with old buildings. We know in, in Japan, I mean this has changed a bit, but historically in Japan, they didn't have the same idea of the continuity of materials being the important thing about a building.
And famously there's still, there's still at least one Japanese temple, which they demolish and rebuild every 30 years. And they've been doing this for a thousand years now, temple which they see as a thousand year old building and as an important piece of Japanese heritage, even though at any given time, the actual timbers will be no more than 30 years old.
And that used to be very generally the view in Japan. I think all temples were treated that way. I think Western influence has changed that to some extent, and now there's a more mixed picture. But that was, that's, that's an, an old view they had of heritage and that would probably have been closer to the view of heritage in Europe in the 18th or 19th centuries before Rus and arts and crafts and so on, which shifted it to more towards like, it's the actual materials that matter.
And I have, I can, I dunno if I can have any evidence of this, but I have a sort of a, a hunch that again, with age, part of what people really care about here is probably beauty, but they don't want to talk about beauty. So they talk about age and part of the huge support that the conservation movement has in Europe.
And this sense, you know, people really feel now, like basically any decent building from the 19th century shouldn't be demolished, uh, and shouldn't maybe even really be seriously tampered with. And that I think is probably partly because people feel like we've got a finite pool of beautiful buildings.
We can't really add to it. It's just like this pool we've mysteriously inherited. And every time we lose something from it, it's gone for good. And like our stock of this just continues to decline. So we should be extremely protective of it. And these like. What are actually like the low end of 19th century building the workers cottages from 19th century, these are, they were a huge achievement at the time, a huge step up in housing quality from what people were moving out of.
They're not great buildings. They were built to a very low standard, like in the 19th century, they would've been delighted to knock them down and put something higher, better quality in place. And yet we now feel like, yeah, I know, sure, but they're not gonna put something nicer in place, are they?
They're gonna put something worse in place. So better stick to the, grim, poorly built to up two downs. So I, I think with all of these things, I'm sure people partly care about, really do care about the it feeling local, it not being a box, its actual age. I'm sure these are all genuine values, which people care about, but I do think they all get a big injection of.
Additional support, which is in fact like concealed love of beauty that people don't want to acknowledge. And so they, um, they promote a proxy for beauty instead.
Ben: I hadn't heard it articulated so well in terms of this thinking around beauty. It does remind me of a couple of things. One is your anecdote from Japan, which I think is true about how they used to or still rebuild buildings.
Is it, is that a Greek philosopher ship? So if you have the same ship and replace all of the planks, is it really that Yeah. The ship of thesis. Exactly. Is it really that ship? And some people would say yes, and some people would say no. And it I could see that's exactly that temple if they rebuild it.
And they obviously said yes, it is the same temple. So they took that view.
Samuel: There's a whole branch of philosophy called ology about that question. Extremely boring field. But they certainly, the Japanese appear to have a different folk meteorology of buildings than, uh Yeah. And you, it works for them.
Ben: They believe it to be true. Um, and actually one other reflection is on philosophy. So I know you studied, I think, analytical philosophy, uh, in your younger years and I did skim some of your work, your thesis, and I think if it's true, if I read it correctly one of it was around the work on emotions.
And how you describe beauty just then led me to think, so I'm probably gonna completely mangle this, but one of the ideas that you had on looking at emotions is that sometimes we think about emotions and there's a kind of rational aspect to them and we kind of think like, okay, this is a rational response and it's proportionate.
But one aspect of emotion seems that it's either underrepresented or overrepresented. So say the emotion of grief, we feel really strongly and potentially if you're gonna be very rationalist about it, you would say maybe that's not helping you, you know, live your life and that. Um, emotion might be too strong.
And you had some interesting thoughts about how you might reconcile those two views of emotions. But interesting when you're talking about beauty, then it led me to think that actually there is a, there is almost a rational part of us or there is some emotional part which goes, yeah, we can say where something is very beautiful or very ugly.
And we do understand that. But there is another part where we are unconfident of saying that or applying that to an emotion and say, we feel very uncomfortable with that. And so we go to some physical thing like you say, aid or the materials used or it's use or, uh, something like that. So I was interested in how much your philosophy has influenced your thoughts about beauty and the place and whether I've just thought about that on the spot, whether what I've just said had any, uh, reference or things to your philosophy at all.
Samuel: That was about right. Um, I, it's been a long time since I've actually worked on, like personally done any research on, on analytical philosophy. So I, it's rusty now, but yes, I, um, I certainly do think that aesthetic and emotional responses can have a kind of speaking slightly loosely, but can have a kind of knowledge encoded in them.
And people may often be sensitive to a whole range of truths or values in the form of their emotional and aesthetic responses, which they maybe don't have access to intellectually. And one of the problems that we have in public policy is to. Try to do justice to some of those kinds of reactions when we are not good at talking about them.
Uh, and it's particular problem. I mean, there's, there's a few different things going on here, but it's a particular problem for public bureaucracies when they come to deal with this. They're very, you know, for understandable reasons, they want to be able to deal in things that are very clearly public, where there's clearly quantifiable data, there's clear ways of arbitrating disagreement.
Now we do have ways of arbitrating disagreement about emotional or aesthetic questions. Like people spend a huge amount of time arguing about whether they're right to be angry or whether, you know, which piece of music is better or whatever. So there, obviously there are ways to talk about these things, but is is in some sense true that they're less straightforward or they're, you know, their, it's not as.
It doesn't come in a format which is readily put in a, in a government document. And so public officials are very uncomfortable with dealing with that kind of thing. But that doesn't mean that kind of thing doesn't matter. And so that does, there is a tendency for those kinds of values to be overlooked in policymaking, I think.
Ben: I completely agree. I see it within healthcare, which is one of the domains. I look at a, a reasonable amount. Uh, and I always do this in a public policy philosopher person in the street, uh, dilemma, which the government always faces in terms of a healthcare budget. And that is we have this idea of a life year or a quality adjusted life year, and we price it those various economic ways to do a kind of statistical life price.
This isn't really the price of life, but they go say, well, 20 to 30,000 pounds for a life year is good value for money for our healthcare budget. And for instance, treating a diabetic meets that hurdle. No problem. So let's do lots of diabetics because cost benefit analysis suggests we'll save lots of diabetic lives.
And then you are faced with something like the preterm baby or the person who's born with a genetic disorder. And when you do the same sort of framework on costs, uh, you end up with a hundred thousand to 500,000 pounds for costing. And so if you're completely cost benefit, you will, well, let's never save those.
'cause we can always save more diabetic lives. And we're a constrained budget, so we're, we're always losing lives anyway because we need to spend money on, on somewhere else. But if you propose that to people, they go, Hmm, that doesn't feel quite right. We still want to save some preterm babies. And in fact, if you ask the person in the street, they would go, yes, let's save some preterm babies.
Like if we, if we had an infinite healthcare budget, you, you would obviously do this and these other things. And so they've actually had to kind of try and get that into their thinking. Whether you wanna call this. Virtue or pluralism or something, this other form of a representation of soci of a society preference.
Say if that's what you want to represent, because we do have a preference for saving some. In fact, we could save them all preterm babies at half a million versus the diabetic at 10,000, even though we know that in pure life value years that isn't correct. And actually you have a range of things, and that's a kind of very clear example which people can think.
But I actually think it is a similar case in aesthetics, uh, when we look at urban design and whether we do civic planning and pride. And how much of that is worth, I think
Samuel: So I'm speaking totally beyond my, uh, whatever field of authority I may have, but I'm sometimes impressed by some areas of British healthcare policy where the government is relatively, some of these quality-adjusted life year programs, they.
Prepared to make a call on how much worse does that make your life, right? This kind of disability, this kind of pain, this kind of and then we'll make public policy on the basis of these what are ultimately going to come down to like judgment calls of someone saying, I reckon this is worse. That, and that seems to me to in fact be basically a responsible way to make policy.
Like they are act they, yes, it's very unpleasant that we have to make these trade offs. It's very unpleasant that we have to make them based upon judgment calls where you think, how bad is blindness relative to using, losing your leg relative to being in this degree of pain all the time. Or to like, but those are the choices we have to make.
And I like suspect if we looked at the implicit trade offs that we're making. They would be totally insane. Like obviously vastly more money being spent on something that's less important in this context and vastly more being spent in that, like trade-offs that nobody would endorse if they were consciously required to make them, but which are made because they're being made by like different single issue bureaucracies who have been given a mandate to make a decision on something just in respect of one characteristic that it has or something like that.
Whereas healthcare policy, uh, seems to me to be made in a, a somewhat more intellectually responsible way. But yeah, that area of healthcare policy anyway, like,
Ben: so I, I would concur, I would say around 80% of it is very much weighted too. A cost benefit analysis of quality and, and other things go into quality.
So it's quality adjusted, pain adjusted disability adjusted life years is another way of looking at it. And when you do have something which is orders of magnitude and there's quite a lot of assumptions go into it. But if something's at 10,000 and something's a hundred thousand, then the 10,000 thing is most of the time going to win.
But interestingly I put these difficult use cases of right where there is a limit to it where you have a society preference, but you are, you are completely right actually a lot of healthcare. And actually that is the work of a lot of healthcare economists doing that. Although, interestingly, bringing it back to transport and planning, a lot of that initial work was done via a road transport philosophy.
Uh, which is that for every mile of road that you build, you are gonna have x million of economic value. But on the other side of it, you are gonna have more accidents and maybe an amount of environmental cost and you can actually price that. Roughly. And if your orders of magnitude out, then maybe it shouldn't be something you do, but it's also the other way.
If you've got an orders of magnitude, a really, really high economic number, then maybe you are making, uh, maybe you are making this trade off. And that's the difficult thing when you actually come to like things like, yeah,
Samuel: no, I think that's right. And the
Ben: like,
Samuel: highways engineering is another area where it's done by engineer, a kind of specialized engineer.
And we might disagree with some of the assumptions they make. We might think you are weight weighting these values in the wrong way, or, but they are, they do have like a consistent system based upon assumptions, which may be sometimes mistaken, but which are not like patently insane. And they do make trade offs in a kind of responsible way.
And I've also, oh yeah, I'm gonna say they're actually doing this seriously rather than just like in a sort of like crazy ad hoc way by contrast. And they're doing it in good faith as well. Yeah. The um, the. Cases we get. We had brouhaha, which you might have followed about the, um, the BAT tunnel proposed for HS two.
So this was HS two, the huge railway running, which, uh, gradually being built between London and Birmingham was going to run near to a colony of a kind of bat, which has some sort of protected status, be genes bats. And it was thought the bats might sometimes collide with the train. So Natural England is effect, it's slightly more complicated than this, but effectively required as a mitigation a hundred million pound bat tunnel that would stop the bats from getting to the trains.
It's not, again, it's not, it's never very clear it would actually have this effect. And you, the implicit trade-offs in terms of the amount of money that there's only a couple of hundred bats in this colony and, the, even if it was saving all of the bats, the number of the amount of money going into saving one bat.
Yeah. Compared to the amount that, uh, the number of humans that you could save in Britain, let alone if you spent the money internationally, like huge numbers of human lives being sacrificed on a, for the tenuous chance of saving a bat. This is a totally insane kind of policymaking that has arisen here.
Yeah. But it's arisen because natural England, you know, it's like good faith. They have a legal obligation to only care about one thing in this context, damage to protected species. And it's not their job to make, oh, weigh that against other values, how many bats per human, et cetera, et cetera.
Like they are just, no, this is the only thing that we are here to do and we are not going to let you build this tunnel until you have made these steps to avoid this harm. So completely insane trade-offs arise in a situation like that. And you just think if we were being. You know, if a particularly intelligent kind of alien were analyzing human societies and they were comparing on the one hand, you know, the NHS working out how much treatment it's going to give to, and the highways engineers working out cost benefit now for road along with these like totally insane trade offs that the British state is also making at the same time in these other, I think this is a very strange, the British state is a very strange thing, the way it can be, act like a fair in its clumsy fashion, fairly sophisticated and fairly rational in some contexts, uh, and yet also aggregated to something which is completely crazy in other contexts.
Ben: No, I, I completely agree that there is this trade off in there. It's the same. I'm particularly interested in green infrastructure and the arguments you make about wind time per turbines because they will kill birds. But obviously you've got to offset this around it. I don't know about good solutions.
I guess ideally you want a good faith decision maker somewhere within the system who's empowered to look at that trade off and then in good faith. Just decide which, what should be more important or not. And if you can't put it as a decision maker, 'cause essentially that should probably be your politician or, or minister, but maybe they can delegate it to a technocratic solution.
You could end up actually with the UK's nice. Within the health system, this National Institute for Clinical Excellence, but on big infrastructure projects. Or you would have a look at their down domain. So wind turbines and tunnels would be an exactly great domain for them. And then these are the five big questions.
And then we have a committee of five who would look at that and Nature England could submit and other people could submit, but they then have to in the round say, is this good for the country or not? In the same way that we do on diabetic medicines versus preterm babies versus this. And they technocratically look at it and go, well, in good faith, we think.
The best thing for this country is A, B and C decisions, and that they're empowered to do it. I, I think you could empower that within a politician. There's lots of political economy reasons why that's tricky. So the next best, I think would be this and time limit. Got six months to submit everything you have on these eight major questions where there are trade-offs.
They'll have three months to decide it. They're gonna decide it in good faith. And then once that's done, that's it. Let's not have any more reviews on that decision. 'cause these are five experts, or 12, or however many you wanna do and do it. That
Samuel: I think, and the good news about the, you know, what the, um, the highways engineers and the NHS committees show us is that it's actually not impossible for the British state to do that.
Like, it's not, it, sometimes it will be ministerial judgment. Inevitably, there are so many decisions that have to be made that they can't all be made by Aries state. So it will need to be alienated into a process of some kind. But like, it does, like also it's still. The key thing is the decision is made by a body who is responsible for all of the different values that are affected here, like effect on humans and effect on bats or whatever the case may be.
Effect on economic growth, effect on the environment, effect on birds and effect on our ability to produce renewable energy. And then they have to make, like do their best to make a sane trade off between these values. And I just like in the cases where cases like these NHS committees or the highways engineers where they are making those trade offs consciously and trying to do it responsibly, I think like the evidence seems to be, we sometimes disagree with them, but they're not like off the charts crazy.
Yeah. And so they'll come to, they're people, you know, not so different to us. They'll come to judgments about it that are not so different to our judgments. The important thing is just that like someone actually makes a conscious call on the trade off and tries to do it in line with the, like, receive rationality of the, and with the framework and the
Ben: governance
Samuel: and
Ben: Exactly.
So I, I know there's a lot of anti sentiment against technocratic solutions and wanko at the moment, but I actually think Nice. Which is this, the health body which looks at it, given all of the constraints, actually does really well. They look at it, they have a thing, their budget's maybe not as high as we would wish, but these are the constraints.
They're under uhhuh. Thinking back to transport planning and the like and maybe going via other places you've been, I think you've spent some time in Berlin or in Germany, and I think Berlin mixes, uh, rent controls. Is it this Mitch Spiegel and street grids? I think Prussian age street grids.
And they're quite permissive on some forms of alterations. So I'd be, I'd be interested in what you think about this mix of rent control and street grids and how successful these policies are, and whether I would say they're kind of culturally specific, so I'm not sure how much you could import to Britain or other countries, but to the extent that you saw good things in Berlin, what would you like to export to Britain or other cities?
Samuel: I mean, I think rent control is a disastrous policy and has always been disastrous wherever it's been tried in. But in Berlin, they didn't really have, so the municipality tried to impose rent controls or did impose rent controls a few years ago. But there was litigation against them and eventually the German Constitutional court decided that it's not an area over which the Bunes lender have jurisdiction is a federal matter.
The federal government has some very limited, uh, rent control policies. I, I, a few weeks ago I was looking into, I was in Berlin actually. I looked into how this worked and I, I don't think I will get the precise details right if I, but it's, so there's some kind of second generation rent control system but it doesn't like rents and Berlin are not much below or maybe not really at all below their market level.
It's a fairly, it's actually a not, it is an elaborate song and dance that doesn't have that much effect in practice.
Ben: Yeah, it's true. When I've looked at it and people looked at it that it was a, it is a sort of pseudo rent control. That's right. The interesting thing about it, actually, we're gonna go off on the, to another tangent, is it to my mind, it actually intersects with a slightly different social contract that long-term tenants and long-term landlords have in the German market in Berlin and, and others.
But it's the way that they're organized. So it's not social housing, but it's the way their landlord thinks about it, but also that quid pro quo, as you can see it as an extreme, if you're a landlord of student housing, you do not necessarily expect your students to treat your property in a way that a long-term owner of that property might for, you know, various reasons, age and transience of tenancy and with our assured.
Shorthold tendencies, say in a lot of British cities, they tend to be six months or six to 12 months. Again, it's sort of in between. We have got some longer and some longer thinking around that. But German tendencies, and again, this is an average, tend to tilt towards this longer term, but there is a little bit of, we, the rent is maybe not gonna be as high as you would have a shorter term, or we'll say, you know, Airbnb in a hotel.
But the quid pro quo is you are going to look after this property or think about this property a little bit closer to thinking about it if you are gonna be owning it for 50 years or, or a hundred years. And essentially my view about the pseudo form of laws or controls they have is embodying a little bit of this.
Unwritten, the social contract that you have between landlord and tenant, of which some of it is embodied in law, and actually you, you see it in London, in, in different ways, is of where we had the tenancy or, or, or potentially how the Great Estates have looked at some of their the way that they look at their properties, but also their relationship with tenancy and the age of that tenancy.
So I've kind of gone off on a tangent there, but that, that's one of the things I think is kind of interesting about the German form of looking at this land or tenant part. I would, but also these alterations and street grids and everything
Samuel: else, I would find it very interesting as, so I'm basically, I'm not gonna give you a good answer on tenancies because I, I find it a very interesting subject.
I have never looked into it very systematically, so I can tell you some. Here are some random interesting facts about the history of tenure in Germany. So at the start of the 20th century, Berlin was almost entirely a renting city. It was over 90% renters, maybe over 95% renters in the actual era, like jurisdiction of the, um, the city of Berlin.
You couldn't have, so what, like owning a flat was, I think legally impossible? I think it did. There was some limited system for it in, uh, the 19th century, but I think it was then got rid of, in the Burges Gazettes book, the, um, German civil code that was introduced in, at, around the turn of the century.
So you could only rent an apartment unlike in, I mean Britain, it was, people mostly rented apartments for a long time, but there was the leasehold system which created, there was some option for having a building where like one person owns the whole building and then the apartments are in some sense also owned separately in this kind of communal sort of complic.
That just wasn't really possible for Germans. There was like someone who owned the building and then there were a bunch of people who rented. I wasn't aware of. And France. France had, um, the system of the modern French system, Cote, which is their equivalent of share freehold, basically, um, didn't exist at all in the early 20th century.
Gradually develops in the course of the 20th century, but it, they were entirely rental societies for flats. Obviously homes were more complicated, houses were more complicated picture. The other thing is most of the, like continental countries have always had a larger share or have for several centuries had a much larger share of their population living in flats than us.
And they have. So it's still, now this is, it's a more complicated people picture than English. People have a, uh, have an oversimplified view of this on which content or Europeans all live in flats and English people live in terrorist houses. And that was kind of was true in 1914, but is far more complicated now.
And like Paris has enormous suburbs. German cities have considerable suburbs made up of detached houses where people are under occupiers. So it's, it's much more complicated than, but the crude simplification is still have some validity. There are still, you know, the cause of French and German cities and still more Spanish, Italian cities are all flats and lots of like families and like the middle and upper classes of these cities are based in flats, in inner suburbs.
And so a whole bunch of institutions have developed to suit those people. Whereas in England, like you had a little, you know, small number of flats built in the 19 mansion blocks, small number built in the interwar period, but very, you know, two sort of tens of thousands, maybe a couple of hundred thousand overall post-war era.
There is no private sector, flat building and all flats built for social housing. And then flat building takes off again in like the eighties and nineties and has been quite a lot of it since then. And that's mostly targeted at. Basically at yuppies like un the childless young people who want to live in inner city areas.
And so the whole, like this immense market that exists in continental countries for the family apartment and all the institutions that families look for, like they care so much more about security and about being settled in one place than yuppies do, who are often quite happy to move around. A bit like that's developed over a long period of time in German speaking Europe.
So they had no option of shared ownership at these building. They do have that now, but they, for a long time they had no option of shared ownership. It had to be done through renting. And they had a huge market of middle class families who also wanted to be living in apartments. And so you can see why under those conditions, renting institutions for private renting would develop that gave greater security of tenure.
Um, and that were very long termist in their approach.
Ben: Yeah. And the kind of things that families would. Families would want. It's interesting. I hadn't heard it like that. That makes a lot of sense to me. And it's quite fascinating. I also think that this way of house building that we've done over the last few decades, because we value internal utility and aesthetics.
So internet, maybe even air condition or how your kitchen looks, uh, and we put value into that, or house builders put value into that, so they won't put the ornamentation because yes, ornamentation has a little bit of a return, but the return on upskilling, your walk-in shower is much larger. And so actually some of our aesthetic value has gone into the internals of houses.
And you know, if you looked in the internals of houses a hundred years ago they're not as valuable as the internals today. So I, I do think some of that value has gone that way.
Samuel: There's some lifecycle stuff here. Yeah. So there's some, I don't know this stuff at all. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not, I don't say this with much confidence, but I people, what I'm told by developers is if you are.
A yuppie buying a flat, you're probably fairly relaxed about the exterior facade of your flat. Like it's really, you probably don't vest your identity in it. And what you care about is location and some like internal conveniences then, like the real, the age where people really care about what their home looks like is like the central family period where you, like your household is an institution and you want to project that to the world.
And that's where people want to, you know, wanna move to conservation areas and spend loads of money doing renovations and plant their front garden and all the rest. Um, and then elderly people, a bit more of a mixed picture. And sometimes because of the, like, um, because life gets physically harder in so many ways, although when you are, you know, very old, physically harder in so many ways, you sometimes have to start caring a bit more about internal conveniences again.
Yeah, and that's, I've been told that a number of times by developers and it kind kind of makes intuitive sense to me. And then you think maybe one of the things which has happened in modern Western cities is the relative shares of those different groups of the population have changed. Like we've got lots more young child that unmarried people living in flats.
We've got lots more elderly people living for long periods with challenging physical conditions. And the share of like I am an institution, families has fallen. And that might be one of the factors. I don't think this is like my general theory of it, but I think that might, might be one of the factors that drives changes in the built environment.
Ben: Yeah. For sure. Okay, so coming back to England there's some who argue that this green belt idea needs to be re-looked at because it was put in so many years ago. And there's some parts of the green belt, which aren't as green as, as maybe advocates think. Obviously there's urban scroll as an issue.
Um, uh, if you had control, what would you think of the greenbelt? Would you redraw it and what urban forms would you like to see around that? Or would you, would you have a completely different idea about how we assess how we do our urban planning?
Samuel: I've always been a moderate supporter of greenbelt reform.
I, I, you know, we were a bit of an anomaly internationally. It's like French and Germans. Spanish and Italians don't have green belts. I mean, they have some forms of urban containment, but this idea that London has like completely stopped growing in 1939, growing outwards in 1939 and still today like.
The edge of London is where the builders laid down their tools when we went to war with Germany. And you can find unfinished streets where the, the road just goes out into nowhere and stops because the builders were confident that when the war ended, they could finish the street. And in fact, it never happened.
Like I don't, this is an insane situation to now does that mean that we should just like, let all cities grow outwards in a completely uncontrolled, unplanned way that we should have, like ribbon development and sprawl and we should grow in the way that Los Angeles has? Good, no, I certainly don't think that either, but like that's not the, those are not the two only alternatives.
There is a possible world where we protect the downs and the Chilton Hills, the national landscapes, and where we manage outward growth so that it takes place along railway lines and comes you know, something like the form that Metro Land grew at the end of the 19th or the early 20th centuries where like.
Mixed use middle density settlements around railway stations with good links into London or into other cities in the cases where there's demand for growth but with clearly defined boundaries with preserved rural areas to give people access to green space. A kind of like, um, a the 19th century you think is a starfish city where you have like legs of arm starfish have legs or arms, but like, uh, the starfish arms reach out, but they're areas of countryside between, and that's how kind of cities like Copenhagen, for example, have managed their growth since the second World war?
I, I have no, like grand plan for London worked out, you know, ready to go for what I'd do if I had a dictatorial powers over greenbelt reform. But yes, I do support a, a moderate version of greenbelt reform in four cities where there's, um, enormous demand for, uh, additional housing.
Ben: And a technocratic committee could probably do this quite well as well.
This trade offs okay, let's protect this. Let's not,
Samuel: or yeah. I mean, it's gonna be some, yeah. Some kind of planning process. Yeah. I'm very much, I, to some extent I've changed on this, but I am, um, I consider myself to be extremely pro planning. Like I do think that, uh, building stuff there are endemic collective action problems, and often you can only solve those by having some kind of planning authority.
The problem that we have is that planning authorities like. They end up with funny incentives. They get captured by one, one little group of the community, or they serve the interest of one neighborhood against all the other neighborhoods or these kinds of, so you end up with various problems with your incentives and principal agent problems and these kinds of, and so you end up with like a bad kind of planning.
But the solution to this is not tear up the planning system and go to a kind of like, panarchy that you get in low state capacity countries. The solution is to try and perform it so that to the, you know, greatest extent possible, we end up with, with good authorities making good decisions about Yes.
Ben: I, I think even most, although not all classical liberals, free market advocates suggest that you put in, transport and other public good infrastructure, you know, as your minimum and, and that's planned. And then, uh, you know, they do want. Remove zoning to a, a wider extent and, and point to some developing nation countries, which are built organically quite well.
But the, particularly on, at, at the very minimum where you put your sewage or waterworks and your transport is quite important there.
Samuel: Yeah. I mean, how 19th century cities developed in Europe, right. They weren't completely unplanned in lots of countries in Germany and in to some extent in Italy and in Spain and United States.
They, uh, the state completely planned the street network and just, uh, you know, that there are maps where the state said, this is where all the streets are going to go. In some cases, they then compulsorily purchased the land that would be the street network and laid out the streets and just left the landowners to then gradually develop it there.
Lots of transport planning went on, some other kinds of infrastructure planning went on, but it was nonetheless, overall obviously a far more liberal system and, and one that was far more pro-development and. London grew from 1 million people in 1800 to 7 million people in 1914. And those people, the amount of housing each person had, you know, greatly expanded at the same time.
So it was a tremendously like expansionist. Expansionist and, and, um, in a sense permissive system, but not a completely unplanned system.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. Works in progress is associated with Stripe. Patrick Collinson seems to have a fascination with pumping stations, the Pacific pride perhaps hidden in 19th century pump station infrastructure.
What do you make of that aesthetic obsession and what maybe today would be a civic upgrade equivalent?
Samuel: Yeah, I don't fully understand. I've never looked into it properly. What happened with these, I mean, some of them really remarkable and even remarkable interiors in these buildings. You think, well, why were they investing in the interior of those buildings?
Did people go and visit? I don't know. So I, I'm too largely ignorant of this topic to comment on it very authoritatively. There's clearly a wider pattern though that like 19th century, certainly public authorities and also private ones to some extent, did invest in these buildings. And it was seen, it was expected of them that they would do this.
It was seen as like, part of, if they didn't do it at all, they would look ridiculous and people would like mock and feel like slightly betrayed by them or so. And that does extend to pretty mundane buildings, like in the extreme case, pumping stations, but also to like hospitals or a famous, you know, if you see a really ugly building in Britain today, you've got like really, really ugly, like maximum ugliness.
You know, it's probably a hospital and that's, there, there were some factories, you know, some university buildings might be as bad, but it's a, it's a, hospitals are often, whereas in, you know, in the 19th century, these hospitals, they were not necessarily particularly elegant buildings. In, in inevitably a hospital has to like, stack floors on top of each other and it has to have lots of repetition in it.
And this kind of, and it's got very complicated functional requirements, which mean you have to make compromises and trade offs. But they're like basically attractive buildings that, uh, still if, you know, when they get converted today, people turn them into luxury flats or something. That's pretty interesting.
Yeah, and that's, uh, that is one of the great questions, you know, like why, like extremely rich people will always be able to patronize exquisite buildings and their tastes will change in various ways, but I, they're always going to produce some interesting stuff. But how it was that, that it was a kind of a norm for institutional bodies, both public and private, to produce stuff that was generally pretty good and was sometimes really spectacular.
That's, you know, that's a bigger more puzzling question in a way.
Ben: Yes. Exactly. Can't be completely answered. Although I do think part of it is the internal aesthetics part. So hospitals have to spend so much more on their on their budget, on the machines and stuff inside that they don't think about the outside.
And then some of it I think is in the pride of the workers. So if you see Victorian sewage works like the brick work in the tunnels, some of it is actually quite beautiful and no one's ever seen that brick work. So there is, there was some element of this is how this is how it's done. Um, and maybe there is something on that.
But again, famously and. Patrick has, I think, two British telephone boxes in the Stripe offices. And he points to one as being beautiful and one is not. But actually that the value of, particularly if it's not gonna cost you anything differently about that beautiful design, is a very large intangible, which then could say that, and actually programmers talk about this a little bit.
Beautiful code actually does mean, does mean something. Anyway, I'll have a little bit of underrated, overrated. And then a, a couple of last questions if you like. So I'm gonna throw out something to you and you can say underrated, overrated, or you can just give a little comment or you can pass on these things.
So you'd be very bad at this. Yeah, we've had quite long rambles and things. We might not be very good at this, uh, short form, but we give it a go. Underrated or overrated charter cities.
Samuel: I think they're a promising, interesting idea. I'm much I think I would love to know more about is the way that local government worked in the Middle Ages, because basically European cities in the Middle Ages were, and this is maybe a bit of a simplification, but roughly speaking, the King gave, or the central government gave a charter to a kind of a, kind of like a charitable trust or something, a bit like, uh, and this charter gave them certain revenue raising powers and certain jurisdictional powers over a certain territory.
And then they're like, well, off you go have a go at getting a city going here. And these survived in many countries, right up to the 19th century in municipal corporations. They were basically charter cities, right? That was like how the cities of Europe developed for centuries. And maybe one of the things that distinguished them from Asian cities, which were, you know, also obviously existed, but didn't have municipal government in quite the same way and maybe plateaued in a different way that, so I was like I've never looked into this properly, I dunno much about municipal government before the 19th century, but very interesting that, like charter cities may have been one of the big USPS of Western civilization before the 19th century, and they were extremely widespread and maybe successful, although of course they did mostly get abolished eventually.
So they're like, it seems to be like a frightfully interesting subject, which I don't know much about. And charter cities today, like, can they find any way of actually getting a stable political equilibrium with modern governments? Maybe not. I don't know, but like, definitely like something I find interesting and enjoy thinking and talking about and learning.
Worth exploring. Okay. So moderately underrated. I think that's sounds, yeah, I think that's probably the correct summary of my response here. Low traffic neighborhoods, I love low traffic neighborhoods. I mean, honestly in Islington, I, there's not many things that I would, if the council proposed to remove the low traffic neighborhood from my area I live in is I would be camping outside the town hall and like appearing unshaven and uh, uh, uh, uh, screaming at the councilors and officers as they went in to try.
I, um, I think their value creating. And um, the funny thing is low traffic neighborhoods are. Left coded and seen as, you know, there's a conspiracy of cyclists and woke and so forth, whereas cul-de-sacs are seen as right coded and, uh, planned by all these like, car companies and ignorance suburbanites and so forth.
But they are in fact basically the same thing. And this like totally obvious point that these two things that are like seen because of the way, the idiotic way that our political culture sorts issues according to like cultural, social and cultural coalitions or lifestyle choices or something. They've, like this elaborate fantasy has emerged that we are, there's this u which side of society you're on should dictate whether you are in favor of cul-de-sacs or in favor and they're mutually exclusive and opposed.
And these are the, basically the same thing in both ca, like a cul-de-sac with a pedestrian alley at the end of it that allows pe permeability for pedestrians and cyclists, but not for cars is essentially a purpose-built low traffic neighborhood. Yeah, and the traffic neighborhood is an attempt to create that in a neighborhood that wasn't originally designed for it.
We know that the private market like produces masses and masses of cul-de-sacs like that because people hate cars. I mean, they like having a car to get places, but they hate having cars roaring past their home. That we know that this is like overwhelmingly value creating for residential neighborhoods in a wide variety of contexts.
Of course, we should try to retrofit this into existing residential neighborhoods where it's possible to do so. But all, you know, the flip side of that is that all the people who love ltms should have a more sophisticated view about cul-de-sacs that like, yes, we should try to preserve pedestrian per permeability in these things.
Permeability for cyclists. Yes, mixed use walkability. All this is totally right as a priority, but like the cul-de-sac per se, is a completely rational adaptation of people to, I really, really don't want to have masses of cars driving fast in front of my house and killing my children and creating noise in the middle of the night, and so on.
Ben: Yeah, it's like you say, it's a very equivalent idea and actually intersects with other things. Like I'm I've now seen a, a bit, I think it was based on the Dutch work on these no road marking type systems around, which also work very well with low traffic neighborhood, LTN. And they definitely seem, from me anecdotally looking at it and the data seems to that, that they just work really well.
Well,
Samuel: they vote, that's it. Like, uh, neighborhoods for Living is roughly the translation and they, uh, they have like five mile an hour limits for cars in these residential areas and like overwhelming pedestrian priority that. Yeah. And no markings. And you
Ben: have to be careful. And the, the the Dutch traffic planner person who did that to prove how successful it was gonna be when in their pilot one, uh, walked backwards or walked backwards, blindfolded across the streets to prove how safe it was to be, to like, say, like this is how much he believed in it.
So at least I, I dunno if that's an apocryphal story, but it seems true.
Samuel: Yeah. And they're not, um, you know, I'm not anti car. Like there are amazing technologies and for rural areas and small towns, they've been totally transformative. And those places probably would've just died out or, if it hadn't been for their ex, for their existence.
But, um, but for cities, in the residential area. If you take any journey you do by car, the amount of it that you spend on residential streets relative to arterial roads, like it's so small and the right to drive at 30 miles an hour through that little residential street you start on onto your arterial road and then the little one you maybe end on right at the end.
That has very little effect on journey time in most. I mean there are some exceptions to that, but in most cases very little. Um, exactly. So, and yet it has so much effect on the safety and the immunity of the streets.
Ben: Exactly. And I think that is where you can do that trade off. Like you say, there's some exceptions where such an increased journey time, you could say it's an economic cost which may outweigh the trade off, but for the vast majority, particularly at say London, it's so minuscule you're not seeing any economic cost to a few minutes on your, on your traffic time and you're seeing a huge increase in the utility, either via accidents or everything else in the community.
Samuel: Needless to say, there, there will be TNS that cut some journeys, which for some people, you know, does add five minutes or eight minutes or whatever it may be, and you can perfectly well understand why I mean. Those people are the losers from the L tns. I can perfectly well understand why they're not happy, but, you know, public policy does have to aggregate and weigh interests.
And I was, I'm afraid that was the way the cookie crumbles.
Ben: I guess back to planning design, minimum space requirements, underrated, overrated,
Samuel: um, generally a bad idea. The analogy is like, suppose that you had you know, you have a country where there isn't enough food to go around, but there is enough that you can give people a basic ration and they'll survive.
They won't be comfortable, but they'll survive. And you say, no, no, basic ration isn't, you know, people deserve comfort. We are gonna require that nobody receive a ration of food beneath this really quite generous ration of food. And so instead what you get. Is not everyone getting the basic rational and surviving, but like two thirds of people get this quite generous ation on the remaining thirds after to death.
That's basically what minimum space standards. Yes, this is a simplification, but that is basically what minimum space standards do in housing. Poor societies like ours, they say like, we refuse to have anyone living in a small home, but we're not going to liberalize housing supply enough that every, there's enough, you know, enough homes around for everyone to have a big home.
So like, some people will get big or medium sized homes and the, the remaining unlucky people will get nothing and we'll end up with a high rate of homelessness and with other kinds of household suppression when people are, you know, living with their parents or whatever it may be. So it seems to me that I can, I sure it has humanitarian motives behind it, but very poorly thought, thought through and harms, um, intent, like acutely harms a subset of the people whom it's intended to help.
And I think it's, I mostly, I think they're very bad. There may be some small exemptions, but special cases, but, um, but yeah, I generally think they're a bad idea over overrated. Yes.
Ben: And I think actually you can offset, uh, a lot of the challenges with better design of which better design shouldn't cost you actually anything if you think about it in, in terms of that.
Yeah. Be pretty good for many purposes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, last one on the overrated, underrated gentle density. I guess this is the whole Create Streets idea, so it's gonna be underrated, but maybe you wanna talk about how you think about gentle density. Well, it's funny,
Samuel: Benjamin, because in a way, this stuff that like emerged with Prince of Wales whatever decades ago, like actually now, it's pretty mainstream.
If you go to a, if you look at all the British planning documents produced over the last 25 years, whatever, since um, the the famous Compact Cities report, um, report by Norman Foster the, uh, and then through the Urban Design Compendium and the feral review and all these different documents, they're all in favor of urban density.
They're all in favor of mixed use. They're all in favor mostly, but basically in favor of traditional block patterns. And this kind of you look at what's taught any school of planning today, and it will be pro urban density, promix use you know, it will differ with Nicholas. Nicholas creates streets and the, the gentle entity movement.
We'll go a bit further on some of this stuff. A and they will be, then they have the, the content con controversial stuff that creates streets sympathetic to traditional architecture as an option. Whereas, you know, lots of people in the planning establishment think it's prestige and bad and so on. But like the basic urbanism of gentle density has become mainstream now and is no longer like a niche thing, which is only being campaigned for by Prince Charles.
So yeah, probably still underrated, but actually now like generally highly rated. And the question is that why do we fail to deliver it in practice rather than like, are we, should we be in favor of it? Or not becoming our mainstream idea,
Ben: but execution, Paul. Okay. Yeah, that's right. And then last couple of questions maybe continuing sort of on underrated is what would be your most underrated or potentially favorite.
Building or piece of urban planning or design,
Samuel: The one I bang on about at the moment, I mean, this isn't exactly a, a, this isn't exactly a building or a piece of urban design, but I say that my, my, my underrated thing I bang on is the city of Dresden Preston, I think is the most underrated city in Europe.
It's, um, that's the, I mean, I haven't been to every city in Europe, so I'm not really qualified to make that claim.
Ben: Postwar reconstruction or No?
Samuel: Partly so some, but it's got lots of, partly just because it's in a very beautiful part of Europe. Saxony is a, like a lovely area. It wasn't part of the grand tour and then it fell under communist rule, so it's not really like in England and France, people don't really know about it but it's like, it's extremely beautiful.
The Saxon Alps dressed in and beautifully situated in this V by a floodplain with the hills rising above it. It was then in the 18th century, they accidentally invented porcelain, an al uh, a Saxon Alchemist who was trying to invent the philosopher stone. Inadvertently worked out how to create porcelain, which previously could only be imported from China, and it was hugely fashionable in the 18 mice, mice and porcelain, which still the thing people know about that.
And so it made the electorate extremely rich and the electorate spent all this money on extraordinary art and architecture, which is still all so much of which have survived or was reconstructed. Interestingly, much of it was reconstructed by the communist government after the Second World War, a completely forgotten chapter in, uh, in history.
And then over the last 2002, there was a referendum in Dresden, um, on whether they should rebuild the city center. And they decisively won for the pro rebuilding people. And since then, they've rebuilt the famous Protestant church, the Kyia, um, and they've rebuilt lots of the urban fabric and it's, you know, been.
Beautifully done to an extremely high standard. Uh, and so it's now this what was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it is extraordinary. They call it Florence, on the elbow in German. This extraordinary center of art and culture and which some of which survived, uh, always reconstructed immediately after the war and some of which is being rebuilt now.
And it's also, you know, it is got a superb tram network and, uh, and generally like higher up and immunity is a very nice place to be. So I, I am like a bit preoccupied with this city and kind of buttonholing people and going on about it at the moment
Ben: and best than underrated. And that's the one where they redoing facade.
So they had plain enough facades and they're putting it back. No.
Samuel: No, it's actually, so that's happening, um, a bit all over Germany. Everyone, some of that is happening in Dresden, but in Dresden it's, it's mostly just fallow land. They, there's, I don't think the recon, I'm not sure a single building has been demolished in the reconstruction of the Dresden City Center because there was so much like plots that had never been rebuilt after the war dressed in the communist government didn't, it wasn't, all bad in its urban policy.
Interesting. But it hadn't, certainly not been concerned to rebuild a density center. And so there's just just empty plots where they could put stuff. And so it's mostly just been building on empty band. Not either retrofitting existing buildings or demolishing modern buildings and rebuilding new traditional ones.
Ben: Okay. And then thinking out to the future, and backwards. So if it's 2050 and someone has asked you what finally fixed Britain's housing supply issue, what do you think would've been the institutional reform or the things that we could point to that would've would've fixed it over the decades?
Samuel: That's, uh, probably a bigger question than I can ask at the end, answer at the end of a podcast, but I think broadly speaking, I think the answer is so I constraints on development.
I have like far more sympathy for nimbyism than most people in the housing reform movement. Like I think random, many kinds of development have genuine negative externalities and they really are like a pain and devalue the homes of the. You know, of neighbors and it's totally rational for people to want to manage change in their neighborhood, to ensure that neighborhood values are preserved and to ensure that the investment that they've made in this place is not destroyed by irresponsibly, by their neighbors.
And we should certainly not wish for that instinct to die out in the English English people because it's so important as a way in which places are created. So I'm, a lot of the emotional tone of standard nimbyism is, I think like morally wrong and also just politically wrong because like people will fight so hard to protect these things.
They've managed in the space of, 50 years, in the first half of 20th century, they managed to impose these stringent development controls all over the world. Their success is total, uh, the huge YB movements in various countries have basically failed to make much progress against them and will probably continue to fail because the interest they're up against are so strong.
But like this interesting thing has happened, which is that in some parts places with an acute housing shortage, new housing is now extremely valuable and the right to develop new housing is now extremely valuable. And so you see these interesting experiments in places like well, I mean there are big examples in places like South Korea or in Israel or in part parts of the United States where you give communities the right to up zone themselves to allow more development.
And they realize if we do this, if we allow more development in this area, we all become drastically better off because the floor space prohibited by development control. Has become steadily more valuable as the housing shortage has got worse and worse and worse. And at a certain point it outweighed the immunity value that is preserved through development controls.
And then, and that was, that point was in fact passed long ago in many of the world's great cities. And now like your home, your property becomes 400% more valuable if you upzone it. You make millions of pounds if you upzone it in many places. And then the underlying coalition of interest starts changing.
And people start thinking now, actually, even as we had an interest in the past in preventing and controlling change, now maybe we have an interest in enabling change. So I think trying to build those new coalitions of interest that, that the housing shortage has potentially made possible and trying to create win-wins rather than having an adversarial approach to planning reform.
I think that is where the great durable shift may come from rather than from the kind of reform that we do that we've traditionally attempted. Using people's self interest. Yeah, that makes sense.
Ben: Yes, that's right. Like
Samuel: incentives do actually
Ben: work. Who knew? Great. And then last question, do you have any life advice or career advice or any other thoughts, current projects that you wanna share, um, with listeners and viewers in terms of a career in thinking about design or think tanks or anything that you've done that you would suggest to listeners?
Samuel: I certainly don't have any advice for a career in thinking about design. Like I don't, I seem to have evolved one, but I certainly, you know, never expected to and have no understanding of how it happened. I, um, policy, I would say it's, you know, you can work in policy and achieve nothing, but you can achieve enormous things.
It's amazing how in Britain. You like all the center right think tanks employ fewer than a hundred researchers, the left wing think tanks, if excluding the TBI, which Tony Bar Institute to put a special case. They're even smaller. I to the, employee 80 research, 60 research or something like that.
And those people are mostly, you know, in their twenties. And then there are some people who work in government, you know, tens of people who work in government as government advisors. It's a tiny world, a tiny world of mostly very junior people. And those people do make up after a fashion, the intellectual pipeline that reaches the British state.
So like working in that, you have scope to be incredibly influential. The amazing thing is that it's not, you know, like billionaires haven't noticed that with trivial sums of money. They could. Basically like take over this pipeline and like dominate the stream of ideas that reaches at least one of the two sides of British politics, which has really not basically, I mean, there's some limited examples of that, but basically hasn't really happened.
Kind of fascinating that's the case but like there's so little money in it. There's so little so few people involved that it's a remarkably easy career to have impact in. So if you, if you're interested in public service and and interested in doing work that, uh, that really matters, I've had like total confidence in commending working in policy to people
Ben: that, that sounds very impactful. Yeah. That, um, public policy influence either being on the research side or I guess being, if you can make it as a public intellectual or doing that, is, um, relatively few people influencing quite important policies and things. So yeah, that's right. Possible to make a difference.
And with that, Samuel, thank you very much.
Samuel: My pleasure.