Rowan Moore’s [amazon_link id=”1447270185″ target=”_blank” ]Slow Burn City: London in the 21st Century[/amazon_link] is a sort of lament for London, which the book praises for its vibrant, cosmopolitan, energetic, creative dynamism – and portrays as destroying the foundations of this success. The reason for this is obvious: the fact that successive governments have allowed global capital to turn the city into a safe deposit box of property, making it too expensive for most Londoners to buy or even rent a home in, and steadily emptying out the city.

[amazon_image id=”1447270185″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century[/amazon_image]

The early chapters give examples of the kind of home building that took place in London in previous generations, the mix of private speculation and public policy that created millions of homes. This was clearly a mixed record but the book argues that little of that was to do with the architecture and planning of the now-notorious post-war to 1960s council estates, and much with social and economic policies. One testament to that is the way those much-criticised flats have joined the market for desirable properties, even in the now-hipste East End. What’s more, as Moore writes: “When riots took place in the Victorian streets of Brixton, nobody blamed the architecture.”

Some of the argument is familiar but I learned new things – for example that until 1951 housing was the responsibility of the Ministry of Health; and that John Stuart Mill had been one of the leading campaigners for keeping London’s parks open and public. The book is a good read and is packed with pictures well selected to illustrate the arguments.

When it comes to the present day, the book sees government welfare policy – keenly implemented by the recently-departed Iain Duncan Smith – as wholly topsy turvy. The government asks why taxpayers should subsidise benefit claimants to live in London. “This is the wrong question – what should be challenged is why living in London has become a luxiry item, even for modest homes in unglamorous areas, and for people who have spent their lives in the city.” He correctly points out that the private market will not fix the housing crisis because private developers will never build more than they can sell quickly, and will never increase supply enough to bring prices down. In a very apt term, he says London is suffering from the ‘necrotizing fasciitis of residential value.’

The fortunes of cities rise and fall. London’s fortunes will decline now unless it fixes the housing crisis. Only the rich can afford to buy homes in the city now – even young professionals cannot get on the housing ladder, never mind teachers and cleaners and baristas; and too many of the purchasers are overseas investors with no interest in the life of the city. Moore ends the book with a manifesto which  sits alongside others including Bridget Rosewell’s [amazon_link id=”1907994149″ target=”_blank” ]Reinventing London[/amazon_link] and Kate Barker’s [amazon_link id=”B00NXX6H3U” target=”_blank” ]Housing: Where’s The Plan[/amazon_link]. The ideas are both sensible and depressingly idealistic in the sense that one cannot see this government – or any realistic alternative – agreeing on the need for the social building of new homes, including on some green belt, on a scale that will lead to a decline in prices. But without people, a mixture of people from the entire social scale, a city is a museum, not an economic dynamo.

The subtitle of [amazon_link id=”B00XIVBUZC” target=”_blank” ]Urban Economics and Urban Policy[/amazon_link], by Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry Overman, is “Challenging conventional policy wisdom.” This surprised me: these are eminent economists and Henry Overman runs the newish government-funded What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, with a specific policy advice remit. In what way are these authors ‘challengers’?

[amazon_image id=”B00XIVBUZC” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Urban Economics and Urban Policy: Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom by Paul C. Cheshire, Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman (2014) Hardcover[/amazon_image]

Luckily, the final chapter of this excellent book answers that question. The conventional wisdom consists of the kind of “place-based” policies so much loved by local governments over the decades. The book: “Argues that focusing public expenditure on ‘turning around’ the economies of declining places has had little success; and specifically, many policy interventions have had little economic effect.” It argues that the evaluation of disparities between places should anyway take account of cost differences as well as nominal wages, and should consider too non-wage and non-monetary amenities. But in any case, disparities between people are more important than geographic ones – people, not places – although people do sort themselves with similar people into specific locations. Thus the skills of individuals matter – places don’t have skills – so the challenge is attracting and retaining the individuals. Or, conversely, enabling people to move away from declining places.

A separate, powerful strand of argument concerns housing supply and land use in general. The book argues that land-use is an under-appreciated factor in differences in urban performance. This is tied in to the argument that decline must be made possible: “We would argue for a greater focus on encouraging labour market activity and removing barriers to mobility. In practice, this will require a better understanding of the three-way interaction between the benefit system and the housing and labour markets, and the expansion of housing supply and reduction of costs of living in relatively successful places.”

The book does have a brief chapter on the city devolution process under way now in the UK, but it’s fair to say that the authors are unimpressed by the standard range of urban policies – ‘cluster’ policies, infrastructure investment, area-based initiatives and so on. While sharing their sentiment about some of the guff produced about localism (and there’s a lot of it), I think they are too sceptical about the potential. Consider for example the argument made in Chapter 8 that infrastructure investment does not deliver on regional ‘rebalancing’ and could be counterproductive; and look at the map below showing the way the UK’s motorways were planned (discovered courtesy of Tom Cheshire, @chesh):

The railways post-Beeching cuts have the same radial pattern around London, as do the big internet pipes. Is it really any surprise at all that the UK is such an unusually capital city-centric economy?

This is a terrific book that summarises the state of economic knowledge about urban economies but – as it also acknowledges – there is much we don’t understand. Why do some declining places in fact achieve a turnaround? Why do people not leave poor locations even when they apparently can? Why do policy makers insist on trying over and over again things that don’t work? Answers will surely involve neighbouring social sciences as well as economics. The momentum toward city devolution in the UK, limited as it is, mean that these are pressing questions, and a lot of people will be piling in to offer answers. Although I don’t share the policy scepticism to the degree it is expressed here, [amazon_link id=”1781952515″ target=”_blank” ]Urban Economics and Urban Policy[/amazon_link] provides an invaluable foundation for the debate ahead.