Many Victorian cities grew by tenfold in a century

In the nineteenth century, cities grew quickly. Between 1800 and 1914, the population of Berlin’s metropolitan area grew twenty times, Manchester’s twenty-five times, and New York’s a hundred times. Sydney’s population grew around 240 times and Toronto’s maybe 1,700 times. Between 1833 and 1900, Chicago’s population grew around five thousand times, meaning that on average it doubled every five years.

Raw population growth understates the speed of expansion. The number of people per home fell, and, in Britain and America, the size of the average home roughly doubled. At the same time, those homes fit on a smaller share of land, with huge swaths given over to boulevards, parks and railways. The expansion in surface area was thus often several times greater than the expansion in raw population. Meanwhile, real house prices remained flat, while incomes doubled or tripled, generating a huge improvement in housing affordability. Far more people were enjoying far larger homes for a far smaller share of their income.

As well as becoming bigger, nineteenth-century cities became better. Their streets were wider, straighter, and better structured as a network. By the end of the century, they had vast systems of public transport. Incredibly, the average speed of public transport in 1914 was about the same as it is today, while its coverage was often far greater. Nineteenth-century urbanism had many of the features that urban designers fight for now, like mixed use, perimeter blocks, and gentle density. And, at least to our eyes, nineteenth-century cities are beautiful. Neighborhoods dating from before 1914 tend to command a price premium today, and tourists travel thousands of miles to walk their streets.

Western cities today grow much more slowly. Between 2010 and 2020, New York’s, London’s and Paris’s metropolitan areas grew by an average of 0.6 percent per year, while even the fastest-growing cities, like Houston and Dallas, grew by around two percent per year. If sustained for a century, New York, London and Paris would grow 1.8 times, and the Texan outliers sevenfold.

This sluggish growth rate has generated intense housing shortages. Tackling them may require learning from the city planners of the nineteenth century. The whirlwind pace of nineteenth-century expansion was underpinned by a distinctive approach to urban government, including a fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so, tolerance and even mandating of infrastructure monopolies, and willingness to charge fees at ...