Molonglo

At the heart of every cliché, there is always a kernel of truth. This is certainly the case with one of my favourite expressions, “variety is the spice of life.” Although, when it comes to a discussion of the places we live, work, and come to call home, this phrase often appears as a related complaint: sameness breeds boredom and frustration. Variety is important for both combating a repetitive daily lifestyle (wake, car, work, car, sleep, wake…) and avoiding becoming depressed by our surroundings (there are few things more crushing to the soul than a vista of endlessly bland streets lined by identical houses). This “spice” is not just about entertainment and distraction. We need diversity in our activities to lead fulfilling lives, and we need personality in our built environment if we are to form deep connections with a place.

In this sense, every urban development has some approach to placemaking embedded within it – from humanity’s first mudbrick settlements in Mesopotamia, to the great “megalopolises” of the Pearl River Delta (where a single city extends in every direction for hundreds of kilometres, accommodating more people than the entire population of Australia). In this era of housing shortages and skyrocketing property prices, there seems to be a cruel process at play, one that is crippling our ability as a society to make high quality, affordable places to live. Because there is such a scarcity of suitable property, we have increasingly come to accept low standards of design and construction as a somehow inevitable reality. Meanwhile, rising profit margins and high sales volumes do not incentivise developers to innovate. In fact, they have the opposite effect. It is clear there are deep problems with our current urban development systems. Before we can begin thinking about how to improve the quality of urban development, it helps to understand its origins. This text looks at the long histories that have shaped the urban development system as we know it today.

The term “urban development system” sounds like it might describe some sort of complex industrial machine, and in some ways that is accurate – urban development has become a systematic model for creating value through building. It emerged in a piecemeal fashion over many centuries, with each generation refining or reinventing the balance of power between money, politics, the rule of law and the military. Since their invention, towns have concentrated resources and people, encouraging commerce and trade. However, in the last four hundred years the idea of a specifically capitalist urbanism has dominated our relationship with place – this mode of operating has transformed the city into a colossal engine, whose only purpose is to generate profit for its owners. We are now living through a period in which the machinery is spinning so quickly it is overheating in an unpredictable way. To understand how this engine operates, we have to be quite specific about the words that comprise the term. It is a strange twist of language that the more common a word tends to be, the less is known about its origins and meaning. Urbanism and development are interrelated, but not the same thing. They emerged at different times from each other, and serve quite different purposes in the built environment. Urbanism is a process of making cities for macroeconomic and geopolitical gain. Development simply means making buildings for private or singular profit. Arguably, it is only in the last half century or so that the two forces have been finally united – a melding that has dramatically destabilised how communities are formed, housed and governed.

The history of urbanism begins at the moment Rome decided to embark on an ambitious project of territorial expansion. Back when it was a monarchy, invasion of neighbours was a straightforward business – vanquished city-states were simply absorbed as vassals and ruled over tyrannically. But at the dawn of its empire, Rome was a republic. This posed some awkward philosophical questions about the meaning of democracy. Should Rome extend voting rights to its new subjects? If it didn’t, how could these people ever come to identify as Roman – wasn’t there always going to be a risk of rebellion and resentment? On the other hand, if it did grant citizenship to the new provinces, wasn’t there an opposite risk – that the empire might get too big, and the Romans might find themselves a minority in their own nation? The answer to this problem was simple: since humans only make decisions with their brains, and not their whole bodies, it followed that if Rome was the head, it made no sense to let the provincial limbs think for themselves. Their purpose was naturally to support the functioning of the head. Through this reasoning the Romans were the first to come up with the idea of a capital (which is Latin for head); and they decreed that only those born within Rome’s city walls (civitas) could become citizens (civis).

To further justify this conclusion, a detail of Rome’s origin myth was reframed and emphasised. When Romulus and Remus founded the city, Remus jumped over the unfinished construction of the walls. Romulus was so incensed by this profane act he immediately drew his sword and killed his brother. This proved that the walls were not just physical barriers, but conceptual ones. Indeed, as the empire grew, the symbolic power of the city boundary came to far surpass its physical role. Such a hierarchical structure of centre and periphery – concentrating culture, politics, administration, finance and religion in one place, and pushing military conflict to the edges – was unique in the ancient world. For example, the Greeks had no concept of a capital, and therefore no idea of a border, or common standing army. Rather, the hellenic world was made up of independent city-states loosely bound together by fluid alliances. They shared a language and culture, but otherwise were in constant struggle with each other. To be Roman strictly meant to be from Rome, while to be Greek meant only feeling an affinity with Greekness. In contemporary terms, Rome was structured more like the United States, while Greece was akin to the European Union.

Because of its imperial structure, the Roman relationship between democracy and space diverged significantly from the Greek. Ancient authors, including Homer, Thucydides and Herodotus, never refer to Greek city-states as singular entities. There is not a single reference to Athens or Corinth, only to the Athenians and Corinthians. This is because Greeks understood democracy as what happens when politicians (literally, the people of the polis, or city-state) meet together. At times when invading armies drove the Athenians out of their city walls, they continued their democracy wherever they were camped. By contrast, for the Romans, civic debate was something that could only happen in the forum. When barbarians sacked Rome and senators left, democracy ceased.

This distinction still exists today, as in the difference between protestant Christians and the Westminster system of parliament. For protestants, the church is not a building, it is a congregation. In other words, community is the space between people, and not people in a space. You can hold a service anywhere you like – in a living room, a hall, or even an open field. Conversely, under the Westminster parliamentary system, a law can only be passed by members physically present in the chamber. How we think about the formation of communities will be largely influenced by whether we intuitively subscribe to the Greek or the Roman model. The virulent revival of nationalism around the world in the last few years owes its origins to a Roman conception of identity rooted in place; conversely, the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment and abuse conforms more to a Greek notion of a non-hierarchical community formed by shared values.

As the Romans conquered more land, they devised a repeatable template to quickly build new settlements. Based on the structure of a military camp, these places were called urbs (which means “a walled enclosure”). Urbs were not cities, and they lacked citizens with voting rights. Importantly, urbs were completely controlled by Rome. Their design was generic, and they had no political function that was not administrative (tax collection and the census, for example). From the outset, urbanity has been defined by an absence of self-determination, and a subservient relationship to some distant centre of power. The walls of the urbs were used for defence, and had no religious or symbolic value (unlike the city). In parts of the empire where the threat of barbarian attack was low, residential areas overflowed the urbs out into the countryside. This sprawl became known as the suburbs.

After the collapse of the Roman empire, the West rejected such a highly regulated model of urbanism for more than a thousand years. Instead, medieval cities evolved in an organic mess. But since the emergence of capitalism, the West has rediscovered authoritarianism. We have come full circle. The way we design and build suburbs today is remarkably similar to those of the fourth century: repeatable plans and readymade infrastructural details; a centralised authority with only minimal (if any) community involvement; prescribed street patterns (spontaneous construction is forbidden); strict zoning, which restricts the possible forms of life and activity in the suburb. For this reason, contemporary urbanism naturally tends towards the heartless and alienating, because the people who do the design are not the people who ultimately live there. When something as complex as a small township is conceived all in one go, the result is the sensation that it is an already-finished and static place, without potential for change in the future. Undoing these abstract qualities of the suburb – invigorating it with real life and community – can take many decades. Eventually, unplanned forms and unusual landmarks will emerge, and with them a group of people who feel truly connected to the place. Localism occurs when people in a suburb recognise themselves as a distinct group with a desire for self-determination.

Urbanism as the practice of planning settlements certainly existed long before the Romans. However, their model of the urb was the first attempt to neutralise the political status and right to self-rule of a planned community. As instruments of imperial governance, urbs closely resemble how nation-states of our own epoch control their populations and territory.

Nonetheless, as mentioned at the start of this text, there is a big difference between urbanism and development. In spite of all the Romans’ successes, they were not developers. They had only very rudimentary ideas about the exchange of property and systems of private ownership, and they did not fundamentally understand the logic of industry. There were massive conceptual gaps and inconsistencies in their thinking. For example, Roman taxis featured a cog designed to drop a small stone into a box every quarter mile. Passengers paid a fare based on the number of pebbles at the end of a trip. This shows the Romans understood how a simple piece of technology could support a financial system founded on time-based access to a service. Yet, when it came to civic amenities, for some reason they never made the leap. Rome had the technical ability to deliver piped water from aqueducts to each home – but since they didn’t have house numbers, there was no way to identify a single household or calculate who was accessing the water and how much they were using. Thus, the idea of charging for a utility never existed. Although it is a chicken and egg problem, and one could equally say: why didn’t the Romans think commodifying public resources was a good idea? Perhaps it was the strength of their civic and imperial sentiment that made this impossible, and that is why they never set out to solve the problem (which might have involved inventing house numbers)…

There could be no development until there were capitalist models of property exchange, the story of which begins in 16th-century England. By 1530, the Catholic Church had acquired almost a third of the country, and represented a formidable opponent to the monarch. Under the pretext of legalising divorce, King Henry VIII set out to “reform” religion, by annexing the Pope’s lands and wealth, establishing his own Church of England, and tearing down the monasteries. In just a few short years, the Reformation made tens of thousands of monks and nuns homeless. Their monastic life had been dominated by a strict daily schedule of devotional work and prayer. They were practically the only literate members of society, and skilled in a wide variety of artisanal crafts. To support themselves, many now reapplied their abilities to education, accountancy, administration, small manufacturing and merchant trading.

The monks’ real secret weapon, which allowed them to rapidly outpace competition, was the technology of advanced timekeeping. Roman time had been a fairly fluid concept, with the hours between sunrise and sunset always split into 12 equal parts. This meant that as the seasons changed, the length of an hour expanded and shrunk. In England, a Roman hour during the winter solstice would have been just 39 minutes long, while in summer it would have stretched to 82 minutes. This flux was at odds with the monks’ desire to pray and eat at the same time everyday, and it was this need for precision that drove them to invent ever more accurate timepieces (and the complex mathematics and machinery necessary to design them). This is why the first public clocks were installed in church towers with bells – for agrarian societies that worked in days and months more than hours, keeping precise time was deeply integrated with religious governance. An hour with a fixed duration made possible the measure of work in new ways. Calculating productivity was as simple as comparing hourly output over the course of a day. Before the Reformation, the concept of productivity had remained exclusively within the walls of the monasteries. After the monks were kicked out, they applied the same logic to making money – none with greater passion than the groups that would go on to be Quakers, Shakers and Puritans. With the ability to precisely manage productivity, very quickly these ex-monastic groups formed companies and mastered the division of labour and industry (a word that refers to pious conservation, and literally means “to put in less, and get out more”). The true legacy of the Reformation was the Industrial Revolution.

The concepts above were preconditions for making buildings at a profit, but two other crucial factors were still absent: private land ownership was almost impossible, and the ability to mobilise large amounts of capital did not exist. The immensity of these barriers was such that the first developer becomes quite obvious: he was a man called Nicholas Barbon, the son of a famous anti-royalist Puritan preacher. Barbon was described by contemporaries as “ruthlessly flamboyant”, and a surviving portrait shows him bedecked in finery with a tall quiff of orange hair, and a mean glint in his eye. He was typical of other 17th-century “projectors” (small time owner-builders) in that he made his living by borrowing money from London’s merchants and building one or two houses at a time for private sale. It was hard to finance projects much larger than this, because of the way risk and securities operated. Until 1680, the record for the single largest development in Britain was held by the Earl of Bedford, and that was only for 16 apartments in two buildings at Covent Garden.

But Barbon dreamed much bigger than this. While on site one day, he complained that the carpenter was taking too long to fit a staircase. The reply came that since each banister had to be individually turned and fitted for the plan, there was no way to speed up the work. Barbon realised that drawing the layout in advance and discussing its construction with his builders might help. This seemed to work pretty well, and the next house was finished twice as fast. Barbon then decided to take the idea to its extreme, and make all his projects identical. He designed a standardised house plan, one that disconnected any specific scheme from any particular site or its manufacture. He instructed his tradesmen to turn out building elements of uniform sizes in their workshops – beginning with staircases and bannisters, but quickly expanding to include doors, windows, and even interior decoration like fireplaces and mouldings. He specified the width of the house (frontage) based on the longest piece of wood available in the London shipyards. Barbon created a network of fabricators and sub-fabricators who together were capable of producing components at a vast scale and incredible speed. By carefully managing site schedules (along monastic lines of daily work) he implemented a smooth workflow. Eighty years before the official start of the Industrial Revolution, Nicholas Barbon was cranking out several hundred partially prefabricated homes per year.

By this point, Barbon’s projects were completed six or seven times faster than his next best rival. He had created an unstoppable machine for making houses – but what Barbon lacked was sufficient land to test these new techniques at their full potential. Ownership was still tightly controlled by royal decree, and only aristocrats (like the Earl of Bedford) possessed very much property in the cities. Consequently, Barbon remodelled himself as Dutch nobility, posing as a rich and kindly benefactor to aristocrats. He lent out huge sums of cash, and ensnared them into deep webs of debt. When they defaulted, he would insist payment in property. Barbon’s first victim was the Duke of Buckingham, which is how he acquired the Duke’s city residence – a great hulking mansion bordering the Thames. Barbon immediately tore down the house and built terrace rows in its place. Before these were even complete, he had moved onto the aristocrat next door. After almost a decade of this entrapment, the only surviving estate on the Thames was Somerset House, and Barbon turned his attention to other game: the commons.

Before the Reformation, the monasteries had such extensive land holdings in London they almost completely encircled the City walls. When they were dissolved, the fences were torn down and London effectively inherited a public greenbelt. These ruins became known as the “commons” – great open fields used for military drills, fairs, sport and grazing. Barbon picked one of the largest, called Red Lion Fields, and in 1677 set about employing two armies of builders in shifts (one would erect houses, the other would beat up anyone who tried to intervene). The crews worked so quickly that before the law courts could prosecute Barbon, he had constructed 800 identical houses – the largest development ever completed. As a final flourish, Barbon diverted a stream supplying an orphanage, and started charging his residents for access to piped water. This was amongst the earliest examples of urban infrastructure. Given the absence of any other utility, like sewage or electricity, the idea of extracting an ongoing fee from houses had a rather limited application. To his credit, Barbon not only worked out that he could commodify a resource that had recently been available for free (water), he came up with fire insurance at the same time. When the City eventually caught up and tried to sue him in the 1680s, Barbon ignored the summons. He claimed he had sold the homes some time ago, and that any complaints would now need to be taken up with the present owners.

Barbon’s genius is manifold. He was the first to instigate off-site prefabrication, project programming and the idea of charging for ongoing access to services. He understood that the city did not just produce profit through sales of real estate, but that by combining development with urban planning, it could generate perpetual revenue. His ability to execute built work faster than bureaucracy allowed him to outpace the law, and thus appropriate the commons. He stole land from the people, sold it back to them, and through a web of complex financial dealings was able to lay blame at someone else’s door. Because all his houses were the same, they could be easily appraised, and therefore fluidly bought and sold. His personal qualities – arrogance, violence, decadence, prejudice, and treachery – have become the very cliché of the developer. Barbon could quite easily have been Donald Trump’s mentor, even down to their equally absurd hairstyles. Nicholas Barbon died just four years before the English introduced systematic house numbering (which previously had only been applied to one apartment block in Paris), an innovation that radically transformed how the city was organised, and how profit was extracted from its dwellings.

Capitalist development requires highly specific conditions, including the ability to accurately value land, the free exchange of private property, and a construction industry capable of building at scale. Underpinning all this is a belief in the possibility of progress and a refined understanding of financial profit, neither of which existed before the Reformation. What Barbon’s story demonstrates is how development relied on extrajudicial operation to establish itself. It was the original “disruptive” technology, and first took root at the fringes of what was socially possible (in much the same way as today’s so-called “gig” economy). Throughout the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, nascent nation-states struggled to control development, trying hard to contain it through planning, zoning and urban regulation. At first, developers worked equally hard to bypass authority, and build as much housing as they could. But as rural populations flooded into cities to find industrial work, it soon became evident that in fact a property shortfall had the effect of increasing rental revenues. Since demand was so high, a dwindling supply generated more profit. Developers were of course still motivated to build, but not too much. They bought up slums and green field sites, creating underdeveloped metropolitan “land banks” whose unfulfilled potential restricted the number of new houses. The most undesirable side-effect of private, uncontrolled development is not surplus, but rather chronic, endemic dearth. A lack of housing is central to propping up property prices. As long as we have capitalist real estate we will have extortionate rent, debt exploitation, and a housing crisis. Put another way, the only existential threat to capitalism would be the realisation of large amounts of high-quality, inexpensive homes. Imagine you never had to pay rent or a mortgage ever again. It would seriously change your approach to life, including your motivation and desire to work and consume – and this would compromise the raison d’etre of capitalism.

At times, development was harnessed by urbanism for the purposes of the state; at other times, development slipped free from urbanism and shook down the citizenry. This financial, juridical and territorial struggle probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for the advent of the Second World War. In its wake, there was such an unprecedented need to rehouse displaced and migrant populations, it was obvious that private development simply wasn’t up to the task. Many countries formed state-run building companies, federal housing programmes and new urban master plans. The question of housing provision was treated as a humanitarian crisis, which loosened the limitations of finance that constricted the private sector. In effect, development became a nationalised affair, and thus united with urbanism for the first time in their histories. The state suddenly realised it was the ideal developer: it had access to cheap money through financial markets and central banks; it had the most advanced insider knowledge of demographics and economic growth; it had a captive audience (aka the population); it had the right, in most cases, to override planning bodies and forcibly acquire whatever land its projects demanded. In short, governments had the power to become total monopolies in the development sector for a long time, but it was only World War Two that led them to realise this fact. The ironic twist of this tale is: precisely because of this centralised nationalisation, it later became far easier to privatise and outsource development en masse.

Each of these battles between urbanism and development has left traces in the suburbs and cities. In this sense, the built environment is a kind of frozen choreography of conflict, a material artefact that bears witness to confrontation and struggle. It is the precipitate that forms as the forces of capital, finance, politics, the state and private endeavour (as well as gender, power relations, and social hierarchy) are neutralised against each other. The shifting tides of social norms, financial structures and civilisational ideologies are manifest in street patterns, setbacks, envelopes and material details. Currently, it is neoliberal property relations that dominate the urban realm – typified by models of build-to-sell, buy-to-let, ownership-through-mortgages and outright rentiers. Speculation, and with it some particularly cynical forms of gentrification, are also implicated. The twin histories of urbanism and development describe the slow rise of depoliticised, alienating suburbs and high-octane property speculation. The weight of the urban development system inevitably leans in the direction of wealth inequality, exploitation, displacement and appropriation. It takes a colossal force to counteract this tendency.

Cover Image: An illustration of Emperor Nero of Rome.