Ban urban planning

A trip to London taught me how to fix cities

11:45 a.m. in Bermondsey: my first beer. I drank my last one at 3:00 a.m. when I got back to my hotel, in Whitechapel. Everything that happened in between taught me that London is correct: urban planning is dumb and bad.

Cities—real cities, the ones that make it an expensive nuisance to own a pickup truck—should not be planned. They cannot be planned. They create their own gravitational force and their own logic that defy control. Take the City of London,¹ where, in the middle of the night, I had gotten lost riding a Lime bike trying to find my hotel, one eye on the wet roads and the other on the confusing directions on my phone. It seemed safe at the time.

The City is so old Jesus could have visited it, if He had enough travel points, and a medieval Londoner would recognize many landmarks. They might be surprised, though, to find a road called London Wall rather than the London Wall, which defended the City for some 1,500 years. (I would tell them that cars are not there to protect them.)

But the story of the City is really the story of economics. Commerce determined and was reflected in everything. There is a Bread Street and a Milk Street; the old London Bridge had homes and businesses on it for centuries, making it nearly impassable; and supply-and-demand contributed to the Great Fire in 1666.

The need for space had become so great and land so valuable that many buildings were built with “jetties,” upper floors that projected over the street, and opposing buildings nearly touched in narrower alleys. Jetties were known fire hazards, so by 1665 King Charles II outlawed them and pledged to punish violators and demolish their buildings.

This changed nothing. Such was the power of commerce—the power of the logic of the city—that a king, whose reign some believe was a gift from God and who could cut off heads for fun, was ignored. London burned almost entirely the following year.

The City was rebuilt, of course, but not in a modern grid system, as several proto-urban planners had proposed. Commerce couldn’t wait for the authorities to figure out a new city plan and adjudicate the property rights. Londoners instead rebuilt quickly along the extant and seemingly illogical streets, but they’re only illogical if you think cities can be planned. The City of London makes perfect sense once you accept that it is a product of geography and human need and greed. Those three things didn’t disappear in the fire. 

Similarly, the Tube, which is the love of my life, is operated today as a utility by a public agency, but it started in the 1850s with industrialists lobbying Parliament for the right to build a railway between London’s mainline termini. They could move their product easier and faster that way, and, preceding Harry Potter by 134 years, underground rail service arrived at King’s Cross station.

Since then, the Underground went from this:

To this:

Somewhere in that map is the route I followed on my Saturday night. After my breakfast beer in Bermondsey, I took the Tube to Angel to meet friends and watch the Ireland-Australia rugby match. Guinnesses were had. At halftime we caught the Overground to Stratford, ran-walked through a shopping mall to find a bathroom, then normal-walked to London Stadium for the West Ham-Arsenal tie. At that halftime we chugged a pint—no drinking allowed in view of the pitch—and after the game we made our way back to Angel, back to the pub, where we wore down the band and they finally played Oasis.

The pub closed and we took the party to our friend’s, a short walk away. I called it at 2:15 a.m., which is when I rented my fateful Lime bike. We were in a car once that night, for about four minutes, when we realized our taxi was going nowhere in traffic, so us clowns spilled out of it and found alternative transportation.

The breadth of London’s transit system as I experienced it wasn’t planned, at least not holistically and certainly not by a central planner. It couldn’t have been planned. It emerged from human beings literally and figuratively bumping into each other and making decisions accordingly, and it’s another example of London creating its own logic. Once it started building high-speed and high-capacity transit, it couldn’t stop. It’d be like a Pringles can, except that has an end to it. The idea of finishing the Tube or finishing London, and thereby accomplishing some decades-old blueprint, is as absurd as the idea of my not eating the entire can of Pringles once I open it. Real cities are created forever, which is what gives them their life.

Hyde Park.

In the 1500s, London started expanding from the historic center, and that hasn’t stopped, but, again, it wasn’t planned. Every notable planning effort to centrally manage the city’s growth has been more or less ignored. “London could no more cease growing than a lava flow can stop its irruption,” Peter Akyroyd writes in London: A Biography.

... the process was complex and unpredictable. London did not extend itself ever outwards in all directions, like some blocked-in mass perpetually extending its perimeter; it spiralled out in various directions, making use of existing roads or trade routes and testing the capacity of various villages or parishes to sustain its weight.

Bermondsey, Angel, Stratford, and Whitechapel were suburbs, yet they are more urban and better connected than many parts of, say, New York City. That makes them more engaging than every part of San Diego, my “beautiful” so-called city.

There are more interesting buildings in London—being 2,000-years-old will do that—but more importantly, there were still people out on the street during my bike ride. They may have been nightlife zombies like me, but they were there, both using and enlivening the city. What is interesting, engaging, or beautiful about this?

In San Diego, and nearly everywhere else in the U.S., we’ve planned cities to death, choking the life out of them with zoning and bureaucracy. The irony is that we get what we try to protect against.

We hate sprawl… so we induce it by limiting development.

We don’t allow more dense housing because there will be more traffic… so we get more traffic because everyone has to drive.

We disallow lower-cost apartments because we don’t want poor people living in our neighborhoods… so we get poor people living in our neighborhoods, just on the sidewalks.

We preserve single-family neighborhoods… so we get six cars piled in our neighbor’s driveway with three generations squeezed inside. 

With a few exceptions, American urban places are homogeneous, disconnected, and increasingly unaffordable, which makes them hostile to humanity. That’s not because we don’t like each other. I think it’s the opposite. I think us Americans are dying for more in-person connection and for more public spaces to merely exist among others.

I think that’s why I am infatuated with the Tube. So many people bump into each other and participate in a single activity together. To a Brit, it’s an unremarkable slice of daily life, but to me it’s an amusement park ride, a roller coaster, just flatter and slower. I’m at the center of the universe when I’m in a packed Tube car. Er, sorry, carriage. 

It makes me think of when folks in the States participate in the national pastime of protesting housing development, and if something does get built, then nothing happens. The neighborhood isn’t ruined. The new neighbors are normal. Parking is fine. Life goes on. It becomes an unremarkable slice of daily life. We have nothing to fear in letting cities breathe and grow and change.

One of the working theories of Out in Left is that the U.S. is an insecure country. We vilify immigrants because we’re fearful of our own place. We crow about our freedoms because we actually don’t have any. This is also expressed in our rigid urban planning. Taming our cities provides a certain security, but really it’s an illusion of control. What we try to achieve through city plans will be achieved by getting rid of them. 

I think the discipline should be renamed urban guiding or city building and reoriented around what those terms imply. What should our neighborhoods feel like? How should they serve us? Who should they serve? These are more pertinent and essential questions about how we experience space than: what should the allowable density be? Or the specific land uses? Or the height limit? And what about parking requirements and setbacks? (Editor’s note: vomit.)

The answers to the more important questions are formulated and found not in planning documents, or in projections about what a city will be like in 50 years, but in the day-to-day interaction of humans right now. How does someone get from point A to point B today? If the answer is “without a car, they can’t,” then we should allow ourselves to fix that today. In San Diego, I can’t ride home after transit closes, or when it’s inconvenient, because we’ve effectively banned bike and scooter share. That is not freedom.

Rather than planning cities with pseudoscientific precision, we should set the bounds of development based on our values and then get out of the way. London valued commerce above all else, and it got the city that reflects that. America is insecure. We have cities that reflect that, and we’re afraid to admit it.

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I’m not advocating relaxing fire codes or turning over the city to developers. That’s not what London did. Its postwar recovery was fueled in part by council housing, the U.K.’s unique form of public housing.

In Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, John Boughton points out that almost half of Britain’s population lived in council housing at its high-water mark in the 1970s, and central to the model was secure tenure. Not coincidentally, economic equality in the U.K. peaked in 1979. A dynamic city requires public ownership, not public planning.

Many who lived in council housing were (and are) immigrants, and they have also fueled London’s economic engine. “They were… good for business, since immigration has characteristically been associated with the imperatives of London trade,” Akyroyd writes:

Foreign merchants mingled here, and intermarried, because it was one of the principal markets of the world. On another level, immigrants came here to pursue their trades when denied commercial freedom in their native regions. And, again, other immigrants arrived in the city ready and able to take on any kind of employment and to perform those tasks which “native Londoners” (given the relative nature of that phrase) were unwilling to perform. In all instances immigration corresponded to employment and profit; that is why it would be sentimental and sanctimonious to describe London as an “open city” in some idealistic sense. It has acquiesced in waves of immigration because, essentially, they helped it to prosper.

Immigrants can only make themselves (and everyone else) richer if they have a place to live, and, because a glut of supply will lower rent prices, private developers will never build enough homes for everyone. Commerce and public welfare are not mutually exclusive.

It’s no wonder, then, why the U.K.’s economy has stagnated in recent decades. It has deregulated its economy, turned its back on immigrants (or has tried to), and sold off council housing. Less than 20% of Brits now live in publicly-owned homes. Newsflash: austerity doesn’t work. Like with urban planning, the intended outcomes are never realized.

The Boundary Estate, one of the first council housing developments in London. We can have this everywhere, but we’re dumb.

London voters rejected Brexit by almost 20 points, so it could be viewed that the national government is dragging London back to the 19th century, when destitution and inequality were as synonymous with Britain as fish and chips. (See: anything Charles Dickens wrote.) But conservatives politics today possess a strain of anti-urbanism that seems as novel as it is confusing.

At least while Oliver Twist was begging for food businessmen were trying to figure out mass transit. Last year, former prime minister Rishi Sunak cancelled a major expansion of a high-speed rail because, like, people would use it? I don’t understand how modern conservatives get to sell themselves as pro-business when their political agenda is making a recession happen as quickly as possible. 

Similar measures have been taken in the U.S., and they make cities more expensive, less dynamic and diverse. Even if you don’t care about diversity for its own sake, as Aykroyd suggested is true about London, there being mixed neighborhoods in income and background indicates an economic vitality and a liveliness at the street level. In other words, rich, white neighborhoods are boring economic losers. The U.S. is already the most economically dominant civilization in history. We would rule the universe until the sun burns up if we tore down the border fence and built subways and put apartments on top of them (to speak nothing of how much more interesting that would make places).

Thankfully, there is growing attention on the U.S.’s urban planning regime. In Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City, Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett identify the problem concisely: “Rigid, overdetermined forms are smothering the modern city. These unyielding environments suppress people’s freedom to act, stifle informal social relations, and inhibit the city’s power to grow.”

Progressive YIMBYs and libertarian developers alike are also pushing for zoning and growth reforms, which has led to pockets of better urbanity and glimmers of hope, but at this rate my great-great-great grandkid might be able to safely cross a street in this country.

Ultimately, what our cities look like is about politics, and politics is about power, and power is either money or people. Ideology and facts are irrelevant. So are plans. Urban planning considers city building a technical problem, when it is in fact a political one.

My friends on the left are staggering through the current political environment like Will Ferrell in Old School after he shot himself in the neck with a tranquilizer, so I just hope rich people realize that there’s more money to be made in the city, the urban city, which is the city that works for and has room for everyone. Until then, I’ll be drinking beer, riding bikes, and watching soccer. Er, sorry, football. 

More dispatches from England

‘It had to be him’: the meaning of Jude Bellingham’s labor at the 2024 Euros

'We're closed, mate': Assessing MLB's chances in the U.K.

1. "The City of" refers to the original square-mile settlement at the heart of modern London. "Greater London," or just "London," refers to the whole of the modern, sprawling city.