Urban renewal policies in the 19th century and most of the 20th century focused on the ‘slum’, identified as the locale of disease, crime, mob violence and moral degeneration – the social evil epicentre. Although many Victorian politicians regarded slum eradication as necessary for public health and public morality, unfit, densely packed and internally overcrowded dwellings were a lucrative profit source, well defended by vested interests. Urban redevelopment produced intermittent but significant progress in the 20th century, with ‘reconditioning’ versus ‘clearance’ and urban containment being recurring themes. By the late 1970s, political attention started to shift away from the housing stock's physical condition towards the economic drivers of inner-city decline, producing economic and ‘property-led’ initiatives accompanied by ‘gentrification’. New Labour reintroduced area selective schemes mainly focused on upgrading ‘human’ and ‘social’ capital to reduce social exclusion. The Coalition government abandoned this approach, concentrating on market-led growth, ‘whole city’ approaches and workforce ‘activation’ via changes in the social security system – a policy intensified by the 2015 Conservative government.

Nineteenth-century public health politics

The rapid urbanisation in the 19th century could be sensed, with noses particularly sensitive in London. The stench from cesspits, rivers, ‘fat-boilers, glue-renderers, fell-mongers, tripe-scrapers [and] dog-skinners’ (Chesney, 1970, p 16) eventually became the ‘Great Stink’ as the Thames failed to absorb London's waste. There was ‘Fog everywhere…. The raw afternoon is rawest, the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction … Temple Bar’ (Dickens, 1993 [1852], p 1). The ‘labyrinths’ and ‘rookeries’ were visited and their sensations reported but attempts to understand urbanisation's impact ‘objectively’ relied on ‘evangelical bureaucrats’: experts in medicine, engineering and statistics with a ‘public good’ vision.

The evangelistic bureaucrat

Edwin Chadwick was the prototype ‘evangelical bureaucrat’. His Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Chadwick, 1842) assembled statistics on urbanisation's effects. Areas with the highest death rates were characterised by deficient fresh water supplies and inadequate waste removal. He then set out what economists now call ‘externalities’: the side impacts of a condition that affect other parties without being reflected in the price of the good or service involved.