#264 | Samuel Hughes; Urbanist philosopher on how to improve living in cities in the UK

Samuel Hughes [00:00:00] Big cathedrals in Britain. Well, the last cathedral in Britain was finished in the two thousands. Interestingly, this was the Cathedral of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, which was a, it was a medieval building which came, it was upgraded to the status of a cathedral in the early 20th century. And there was lots of debate and brouhaha about what they were going to do.

Vance Crowe [00:00:23] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we do a fun and interesting conversation with a philosopher, economist, lover of architect and academic named Samuel Hughes. Samuel comes to us because my executive producer, Ben Anderson, said, you gotta check out this guy's Twitter feed. He makes all these interesting observations. So I did, and one morning I was thumbing through there and saw, Hey, he had some ideas on electrical power lines that could be shaped differently, or how should you design buildings for people that are Hurricane Katrina survivors? His feed is so interesting that you could get swept up in it and start having all of these conversations in your head, but once you get sit down to talk with him, you realize he's thought about different concepts that are complicated from all sorts of different angles. So what you'll find today is a casual conversation. You could have maybe heard in a quiet pub over in England about things like, how should we think about putting in bike lanes and how that makes it difficult for people that are driving cars, but maybe makes the city more livable? How should we think about trees and ways to use space like alleys and behind houses to be able to enrich the environment? And at the end, we have a conversation about will cathedrals be built in the future and should the government be spending money to make their civic buildings like courthouses and jails beautiful?

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] Or is that a horrible waste of taxpayer expense? This is far afield from all of the chaos that's going on in the world today. But truly, I enjoyed hearing Samuel talk about these things and to recognize that really no matter what is going on in the world today, we have to take actions that will make the world better in the future. If you don't plant a tree today, you won't have its shade to sit under tomorrow, and there'll be nothing for your children to sit under. And so in order to do that, we have to take the time to really have these patient and well thought out conversations. If you're the type of person that loves patient and well thought out conversations, and you like talking with people about things that aren't necessarily the news of the day and what's going on, and who slapped who and how all that's working out, then you may wanna consider joining the Articulate Ventures network. There you can meet with other people that listen to this podcast and have really great discussion about things that we talk about on the podcast, but also get into conversations where you can debate different perspectives and even practice your speaking skills. If you're interested in joining the Articulate Ventures network, then go to Network dot Articulate Ventures. Thanks so much. I hope to see you in there. And now onto my interview with Samuel Hughes. Samuel Hughes, welcome to the podcast.

Samuel Hughes [00:03:13] It's a pleasure to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:03:15] So listeners can tell right away you have an accent, which means you are across the pond. I found you because I was looking at some of your architecture and kind of urban design work, but to start off, what do you do day to day?

Samuel Hughes [00:03:30] Well, I'm mainly an academic, so I was trained in academic philosophy and became interested in architecture. I've done some work in a number of different British think tanks, and I've done some work with the civil service. But yes, I was always, I was funny think I was terrified of social media. I never had any social media accounts apart from academia.edu and LinkedIn. And one of my colleagues prevailed upon me said, look, this is, people will enjoy this. So it's great for boing. I set up a Twitter account and actually I get very, very warm and enthusiastic responses and lots of interest, and I've, I've learned a lot from it.

Vance Crowe [00:04:08] Well, there's something quite enriching about the things that you do because I think most people walk past the things that you take photographs of and never notice them, but you make observations about how they fit or why they fit. I, I'm particularly thinking of, I think it was like a French wall of apartments that they all kind of look the same, but they look a little bit different. And you were talking about how their symmetry makes them, you know, a cohesive group. I would've walked past that a hundred times and never saw what you saw. So how do you come up with where you're taking photographs of and these ideas you capture?

Samuel Hughes [00:04:45] Well, it's a weird mix. I mean, I, a lot of it's this, I am in, I mean, about half the photographs are my own, and they just, I happen to be somewhere and I'm, and once you get into the habit of running a Twitter account, you, you think, hang on Twitter will be interested in that site. I just have to, so I take a lot of pictures that way. And then I, I comb Creative Commons sometimes, and I, and when I'm bored at work, I, I travel around England on Google Street View looking for interesting changes in the built environment. That, but I think, I mean, you point to an interesting, to something important here, which is that people, I mean, I do get a lot of response for posting about ju quite, you know, simple observations about architecture, but picking out things that are easily overlooked. And I don't think there's an easy way into that. I mean, I, that's the product of reading a a lot over many years, that you gradually pick up some of these kind of tools of, of what people call facade analysis, looking at the facade and working out, okay, why is that facade nice? And that facade ugly. There's no basic introduction to, I, I really, I couldn't think of a basic introduction to that available. I don't know how people are supposed to get started with that. And it's, yeah, it, so it's a kind of a strange gap in the market. And it turns out there really is a market. People really are furious about all this stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:06:07] Yeah, it strikes me that it, instead of being able to look at the whole of something and be like, oh, I want to learn about architecture, you really have to say, Hey, I'm interested in this one tiny aspect and develop a deep enough knowledge of that one aspect to allow it to illuminate others. I've been working a ton with camera equipment lately, and so I had to become really interested in light. And I thought, Hey, I'm only learning about this to make these cameras work better. But suddenly you start being like, oh, I can see how they did the lighting in that movie. I can see how lighting impacts that painting. I can see how lighting impacts the way that facade looks. So I'm totally with you that I think you, like, there's no introduction to the whole, you almost have to find some small niche.

Samuel Hughes [00:06:51] Yeah. And one of the things you notice is G Shaw said you never really understand anything until you've worked on it yourself. You've, you've been forced to make it, or you've been forced to do it in some way. Now, I have not been forced. I'm not an architect, so I don't have that great of knowledge. But I do notice, you know, the books, and not all people, not all practitioners have the gift of communicating the art to a wider audience. But when they do, those are often the best books because then you really get someone who's had to wrestle with the practical problems of actually how do you, how do you get a window to look, right? How do you, if you are putting in a Juliet balcony, you know, how do you stop it looking too high? Or how do you stop it from bulging out too much or so really, really fine grain details. And if someone knows how to put that into print in a way that's accessible to a wider audience, it's really, really interesting, really good stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:07:45] You know, it strikes me that this is actually remarkably similar to philosophy, right? If you go to study philosophy in general, it's just too big. It's just too, too wide to put your arms around. So you have to start somewhere. And I think that the, starting somewhere you feel like you're drowning for a while. I know for me, I started in philosophy by learning basic logic, you know, syllogisms and constructing. How was your introduction to philosophy? How did you decide, hey, I'm gonna go pursue this at, at the university level?

Samuel Hughes [00:08:15] Well, I was, I was taught at school in the last two years at school. I did say I didn't know what the American equivalent would be, but, so we specialize in just three or four subjects, un unlike an American high school, we specialize in just a few subjects in the last years of our high schools. And one of mine, I chose to do philosophy, and I was taught by a, yeah, a brilliant teacher who I, and I suddenly thought, oh, this is really, yes, it was the, you know, the, the thoroughness. Some clarity of argument in the sense that if there's something which you sort of think this is roughly right, but I'm not quite quite sure exactly how it is, right? Philosophy, you know, it's the impulse that drives you to keep on looking at it and going, right, hang on. So what actually is a little bit of truth in that? How can we sift that apart? Where does the argument work? Where does the argument not work? And that kind of intellectual fairness appeal to me enormously when I was, when I was, yeah, 16 or 17. But I, yeah, I went into it gradually. 'cause my first degree was in a mixture of philosophy, politics, and economics. So I only specialized slowly in philosophy and I maintained very broad interests.

Vance Crowe [00:09:26] And what did you imagine when you were studying this, that this would lead you to, did you have a career in mind?

Samuel Hughes [00:09:33] I mean, I, I, that's a good question. I mean, I always wanted to put philosophy to some further use beyond the academic practice of the subject, but I wasn't quite sure what it would be. So I mean, the problem with philosophy, which is, as I say, a wonderful subject from which I've gained a huge amount. But the problem with it in professional terms is we've got a lot of really clever people in philosophy departments all working on problems, you know, most of which are thousands of years old. And so the marginal gain that you will tend to make by contributing to that is often quite a small one. And I know lots of, you know, lots of my friends and colleagues who do find there is this frustrating quality. They are, these are people of enormous intelligence applying immense discipline and effort. And they will finally get a, you know, a few papers or a book out, which makes a few very, very brilliant moves in a very, very obscure debate. And tiny handful of people will read that. And there's a, there's a sense in which you, you're making a huge investment in, in some respects, not getting a huge return on it, or, I mean, depending on how you understand. Anyway, I always thought I would, I would like to be able to put this to the rigor and the clarity of thought and so on to some further purpose beyond academic philosophy as normally understood. And that's partly how architecture and urbanism fit into that.

Vance Crowe [00:10:55] Yeah, it's funny with philosophy, it's similar to mathematics, right? If you ever know anybody that's getting a PhD in mathematics, in order to get that PhD, you have to discover something new. But in order to discover something new, you have to go to such abstract edges of the way that you think that your addition to the, the, you know, culmination of, of our human understanding of mathematics, it makes it so most people can't even understand what you're talking about. 'cause that's right, 5, 10, 15 years to be able to get to the edge, let alone discover something new. So when you say you applied this to architecture, like you came out and, and you were just like, oh, I, I can tell me more about that.

Samuel Hughes [00:11:38] Well, I was, I mean, there's a picturesque story actually. I was, so one of my old tutors brought a cruin. I was, he was, I was a visiting student at that time in Berlin, and he happened to be visiting Berlin as well. And I took him on an architectural tour around the city and was discussing this issue with him. Look, look, Roger, I, I want to, you know, find some something. I can put these intellectual skills to do something useful with them that's, you know, continuous with philosophy, but it goes beyond academic philosophy that's normally understood. He said, well, what you should think about is, is going into a field that's, you know, adjacent to philosophy where the existing standard is much more haphazard. And so with even a modest talent, you can make a huge contribution. So why don't you do architecture? The existing standard there is often terribly low. So marginal gain will be very easy and you're obviously interested in it. So I thought that's an interesting idea. I should start working on that. And then, I mean, the way I ended up getting professionally involved was while I was still a graduate student, the British government ran something called the Building Better, building Beautiful Commissions. They were interested in how to raise standards of architectural design in British housing developments. My old tutor was made the chair of this commission and he asked me to be his research assistant. So I ended up totally, it was extremely unlikely series of events, but I ended up working on sort of built environment policy at quite a high level while I was still a graduate student in philosophy.

Samuel Hughes [00:13:11] And I, I mean, I, you know, very quickly found myself hooked by it ab absolutely fascinating. And, and yeah, I might have something to offer here.

Vance Crowe [00:13:20] And so is that what you're doing now with the policy work you've done with different groups and your role in civil servants?

Samuel Hughes [00:13:25] Yeah, that's broadly speaking, yes. Looking at looking at policy innovations that could solve some of the, the sticky problems that we've put ourselves into in this country in terms of not producing enough homes and not producing homes of a high enough standard.

Vance Crowe [00:13:43] Yeah. And aren't houses, didn't housing prices like just skyrocket in the UK just in the last year? I mean, they're certainly happening in the US but I think I just saw something on social media today, something like a 13% increase in one quarter or something like that.

Samuel Hughes [00:13:57] So there's been a particular rise recently. It's, I, I mean I haven't looked into this in detail, but I think it has to do with the market recovering after the pandemic and people will be calibrating their expectations about where they're going to be living and where they're going to. I mean, it has surprised some people because of course people thought, okay, we've now, you know, we are less likely to be working in offices. We've got used to using Zoom and so on. Maybe people are all going to diffuse out into the countryside and actually house prices and cities will decline. But that hasn't happened. And in fact that, you know, maybe predictable that hasn't happened because people have been saying since the 1920s that the improvements of information technology are going to lead to people spreading out and not needing to live together in cities every anymore, and to falling house passes in cities and decade after decade, that's always turned out to be false. And people still want to live together and physical proximity still matters. So yes, we're seeing the latest, the latest installment in that, in that saga, but it's,

Vance Crowe [00:14:58] I think we've seen that in the United States as well. People have this perception that people are leaving the city and moving to the countryside, but in reality what they're doing is they're moving from a highly dense city to a another city that's maybe not quite as highly dense yet, but in a more remote place. So you see places like Missou, Missoula, Montana, just, just growing by leaps and bounds, or Austin, Texas, whereas they're so people aren't go into a country lifestyle, they're moving from one city to another, just a less big than Los Angeles or New York.

Samuel Hughes [00:15:29] Yeah. And in fact, you know, people are still moving to Los Angeles and New York, despite the many problems of living in those cities and the, you know, skyrocketing prices and various issues that the development of those cities has faced. They, they still have appeal even now. And the, the, you know, incredibly high prices that you have in the Bay Area and in Manhattan testified to that. So it's, yeah. So

Vance Crowe [00:15:56] Let's hear about the sticky problems that are going on in the UK that you're trying to, to resolve.

Samuel Hughes [00:16:01] Well, I mean, one of our problems, so one problem we have is a quantity problem. So we did, I mean, historically cities, they tend to grow. Populations sometimes grew quite rapidly, but they couldn't grow outwards that fast because everyone had to walk everywhere. So they were constrained and their outward growth for its reason. So what they would do as population grew is that they would gradually make a more, a better use of existing land. And you'd get this very fine urban fabric that we know from cities like Florence or Paris or Rome cent trains, buses, tram cars. You got massive outward growth in cities, which in many ways is very good thing. It gives people, you know, gardens and space and more light and immunity and this kind of, that never maybe went as far in this country as it's gone in the United States, but it did, you know, in the twenties and thirties, very, very rapid outward growth of London. And while that was going on, we got quite, didn't, we got quite bad as intensifying existing cities, we tended to, one scenario was built, the expectation was it will stay like this forever and the government will prevent any change from happening. And that's, we'll, that's not a problem because we'll always be able to meet new housing need in this country by just adding more onto our cities than the outside. And a certain point problem kicked in in Britain, which I think hasn't kicked in the same way in the United States, which is that Britain's a small country, people are very, very attached to the landscape of Britain and the countryside.

Samuel Hughes [00:17:34] So it becomes politically impossible to grow cities outward anymore. And British cities, so, especially London, it's now surrounded by something called the Green Belt. So a huge area of land, much larger than London itself, where new building is basically prohibited. So where the builders and many, in many parts of London, literally where the builders downed their tools in 1939 is where the city stops. And even today, that's still where the last buildings are on the countryside exists after that.

Vance Crowe [00:18:04] Well, and London is an interesting place 'cause you can get on a train and be leaving the city of London for what to an American seems like forever. You know, to get in a train and get outta Chicago takes maybe 20, 25 minutes. But you, I I think I've been on trains for over an hour and you just don't even get out of the city 'cause it just keeps going. So it's surprising to me to hear you say that there's this like green belt, but you have successfully kept countryside for as many people that are on that tiny island. You can drive and see rolling hills and, you know, green mossy areas. It's, it's a, it's an unusual, I I hadn't, I hadn't come to the conclusion as to why that ha that was,

Samuel Hughes [00:18:41] It's all government policy. It's, oh no, that's an exaggeration. But if it were not for the green belt, London would be gigantically larger, like several times larger than it in fact is phy physically speaking. And the population would also be much larger, but not to the same extent. And that even across the channel, I mean in Paris has grown by, I dunno, three or four fold since 1945. And London's hardly grown at all in terms of its, you know, physical area. So that, and that most British people are in favor of that. And the green belt is a popular thing and most people do not want London to develop in the way that, well, how many American cities have developed with a huge expanses of, not necessarily because they're opposed to that in principle, but just because in all circumstances that would mean building over so many places that people don't want to see built over. But the question then is, okay, if you've got rising population, rising housing demand, how else do you meet that, that housing need if we're not going to grow outwards in the same way? And that's been a very difficult problem, which we haven't really solved in this country, haven't solved it for decades. And so we've been steadily rising house prices throughout that time. Now we've got, you know, falling home ownership, very steeply falling home ownership among young people. And this produces a lot of social strain and a lot of social problems. So it's, it's a very creative issue in fact.

Vance Crowe [00:20:04] And the, the dropping home ownership, what is the kind of thought on why this is happening?

Samuel Hughes [00:20:12] Well, I mean, the short answer is because prices are so high that it's young people can't raise the capital to buy a house. There are, yeah, there are complexities to it that go beyond that, but that's the, the simple version is actually pretty good. That's basically the answer to the question.

Vance Crowe [00:20:28] And how are things like inflation going on in the UK right now? Because here, this is what, particularly among the ag community, people are talking about this all the time, not necessarily in the media, but, but in, in social circles,

Samuel Hughes [00:20:41] Well, we do have, so we are just recently that we have, do, have rising prices in this country, rising prices. I'm afraid though I may have to disappoint you on this. So I did study economics as another graduate. I studied microeconomics and macroeconomics and macroeconomics I hated and macroeconomics I greatly enjoyed. And nowadays I find that small quantity of microeconomics that I had studied at university extremely useful. I use it on a weekly basis. I think it gives me a huge advantage in understanding lots of things about how the housing market works. Whereas when it comes to macroeconomics, I have the faintest idea, I cannot understand anything about inflation exchange rates, central banks in all this is closed book to me. And even though I, I ought to have a decent note. So I, I can't give you interesting and educated comment on the subject of inflation as much as I should like to be able to,

Vance Crowe [00:21:35] Well, micro and macro inflation I once heard compared to nutrition science, right? So we think about, oh, nutrition science, this is something we could know and understand about how food works. But in reality, when you get down to it, you can understand how organs work, you can understand how calories work. But the culmination of all of those things stacked together, biochemistry, physiology, these kinds of concepts are just like macroeconomics where there's so many factors that to be able to talk convincingly or, or with, with a lot of detail is really difficult to do on the macro level.

Samuel Hughes [00:22:11] Yes. And I have the sense that even quite basic stuff, you don't get the kinds of consensus among macro economists where you can be a, the great majority of macro economists say, okay, well we know basically this is the problem and this is the solution seems, although there are various, you know, more fine grain things that we're not sure about, it seems to get disagreement right at quite fundamental levels about appropriate government policy on things like debt, national debt and inflation. And I think as a lay person, I'm hope just be underqualified to to, to, you know, to comment.

Vance Crowe [00:22:47] And so when you head to the pub, if you were going to run into a, a good friend that has a deep knowledge in a subject area that you really enjoy talking about, with all of your knowledge of philosophy and architecture and economics, what is the subject you love talking about at the pub?

Samuel Hughes [00:23:05] The subject I most often talk about at the pub will probably be policy, actually built environment policy. I I, every so often I have some friends, so some friends who are professional architects upon whom I, with whom I can have finally have a long conversation. Actually pubs are less good. A walk is better with a friend who really knows, really knows about architecture. And then you can, I mean, to do it with someone who really knows properly, I'm a just an amateur in this stuff. If you to, to, to walk a city with someone who has a really good professional knowledge of it has a great joy and you learn so much so quickly. So, so I do have, yeah, I have a few friends with whom I would talk architecture, but with the standard friends I work with a lot people I do lots of collaborative work with and we frequently will end up in the pub at the end of the day with them. We'll be talking, yeah, we'll be industry talking shock about, about policy, politics, built environment, politics, urbanism, this kind of thing.

Vance Crowe [00:24:08] And compared to all of the other things going on in the world right now with Ukraine and COVID and I, I'm not even sure what's interesting in, in the uk how does urbanism and the subjects that you're talking about, how much do you get playtime? Like how much is what you're doing being focused on by the people that can make decisions?

Samuel Hughes [00:24:28] Oh, lot. I mean, we don't get so media attention, you get some, so it's risen, it's risen in recent years because, well, basically because of the housing crisis, the housing shortage and that's sort of focused minds of the whole generation on this. And especially a lot of young people now regard this as sort of one of their top issues. One of the things they're most interested in. So you, so you will get some media attention on that policy attention. We get loads because the government is, is very, I mean, interested in these areas and they, they recognize that the housing shortage is a crucial problem. They recognize they need to find ways of buying an existing communities to support development that they need to find ways of raising the standard of new development so that people oppose it less so it's, I I I, yes, we've, well, I mean the, the, the secretary of state. So the relevant minister has publicly taken a big interest in the work that I and my colleagues have done and has said they're, you know, very keen to implement some of this and we, so yeah, we haven't had any trouble at all getting, getting interest in policy makers.

Vance Crowe [00:25:39] And so what are proposing that is different than what would just happen naturally if you let the government kind of just do what they were gonna do?

Samuel Hughes [00:25:48] Well, I don't know, what would the government, I mean there was a big, so there was a big reform program about housing proposed recently in this country by the government, which has now so got encountered a lot of opposition and has now been sort of put on the back burner or they're not quite sure what they, you know, I think they, they have said they, they haven't published the bill that they were planning to publish on, on planning reform, but they're now, you know, looking at a, a new version of it or a sort of follow a successor or finally producing a a published version. What, yeah, I mean the thing, the thing that I'm very interested in is, you know, how can you, so if you've got lots of existing suburban areas, quite low housing densities, people in those areas tend to be understandably very resistant to change happening to new stuff being built near them. That's totally sensible. If new stuff gets built near them, they probably lose property value. They get various kinds of disruption, they expect that new stuff built near them is likely to be ugly and perfectly reasonable. It probably will be ugly. And they, so you get lots of resistance to this and that's generally made this so suburban intensification is what people call it that's generally made that impossible for, for many decades.

Samuel Hughes [00:27:24] That's, you know, historically very unusual. That used to happen all the time in all European cities. That happened in the United States as well. And now it's become very difficult and with a culturally institutionally you kind of lost the habit of doing suburban intensification. What I'm interested in is if you can find ways of for streets to opt into suburban intensification where they think it will benefit them. So if they think that by converting from low density bungalows or semi-detached, I, I'm using British terminology here.

Vance Crowe [00:28:00] That's okay, I get it. Yeah,

Samuel Hughes [00:28:02] Right. To, to something like the traditional urban forms of this country. So the Georgian terrace, these sort of three, four story terrace houses in many cases in London, they could huge amount of increase in property value by creating permission for them to do that. I mean, in fact literally people will become millionaires overnight just by creating the permission to do it. They wouldn't even have to do anything. The mere fact that their house had those permissions to change in those ways, the hope value would make them into asset millionaires straight away. The

Vance Crowe [00:28:34] Hope value

Samuel Hughes [00:28:36] The economic term. And they, there might be, we don't know, but there might be a lot of streets where people think this is the biggest economic opportunity that, you know, I and my family will ever have. We are really interested in this, we are really interested in ways that this our street could change that will be positive for us. I would also be positive for the wider community by creating a lot of new homes and alleviating the housing shortage. So we've looked at whether you could do something like street by street votes or block by block votes to allow streets to opt in to that kind of change where it's where they want to do. So there are some precedent for this in the, in the United States actually Houston has a system that's related to this, but you, it's an opt out system. So they, I think they, they abolished minimum plot sizes in suburban Houston, but you can opt back into minimum plot sizes if you wish to, to holding a vote. So it's the same principle that we are working on, but a slightly different mechanism.

Vance Crowe [00:29:36] Well, and that's where you're talking about urban sprawl being just absolutely massive in a place like Houston and to be able to figure out how can we get people to increase the density of their places Makes a ton of sense. You know, there were some things in your Twitter feed that I found to be rather striking, one of which was opening up the rules where alleys are so in, in, presumably in the UK I know I used to live in a house with an, with my backyard facing an alley and it was just a dumpy thing, right? The back of fences and it's where you put your garbage, but the opportunity for people to build something different there. Talk a little bit about that. I found that to be a very innovative idea. Yeah,

Samuel Hughes [00:30:13] So this is a, a classic example. I mean, so back in the 18th century we used to have these service alleys, we call them. We used to call Muse a muse alley in this country. They were used for carriages and stables and things. Eventually the carriages and stables became redundant because people didn't have horses anymore or because they, you know, economics changed and then they converted these old muse alleys into inhabited muse. So they're these extremely pretty streets made of converted stable blocks that are usually behind the much more, you know, the grander streets that 20th century, you get a different version of this. So you get all these service alleys behind English houses, which were originally parking alleys say, usually lined by small garages. They've become totally, I largely disused now partly because cars are larger than they were in the twenties and thirties and fifties and so on. So people literally can't fit their cars into the original garages. And partly I think cars are harder to steal now than they used to be. So car edge is less of an issue than it was at that time. So these now basically a wasteland, these spaces and their security hazard as well because obviously burlar can creep into the service alley and then just hop over the fence into any back garden they like and then creep back into the night. So it's a, it's a classic example of wasted space that's not only is it not doing anything good, it's, it's actively bad for the people on this, on this street under our current system. What we want to find a way of doing is to do the same thing with these as happened with the old stable blocks in the 18th century, allowing what's become now a kind of superfluous or dysfunctional service alley to become a kind of inhabited alley or an inhabited muse.

Samuel Hughes [00:31:55] You say great very picturesque streets and you can actually improve the overall quality of the blog. And if all the houses end up doing it, if they, you know, which in some places they have a very strong incentive to do, you could double the number of homes that are in a, in a given block, so you'd make a great contribution to their country at large. And this, this is a win-win solution. It, it could be good for the existing residents, good for new residents, good for the city as a whole. Our current system makes it really difficult for that to happen in various ways. So we are thinking could you have some kind of block by block voting system, which are a block if they've got one of these parking alleys running down the middle, they could say, look, we'd like to now create permission for anyone to turn their old disused garage into a muse cottage of some kind. We'd like to find a way to, to just, just to allow the individuals on the block to make that happen. And we think we'd have a very strong incentive, you know, a very strong incentive to do that in some cases.

Vance Crowe [00:33:01] To me that's like people being able to go out in, into their backyard into the alley and find hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value based on the drawings that you were sharing. Like in, in our current setup where I had in my backyard in my alley, it was basically to go throw the garbage into the dumpster. And so it was just like, how do you, you know, if you could find a way to still be able to get rid of your garbage but be able to turn that alley into something a a, a backwards facing area, it really would improve the whole quality of life in those areas. Which right now is, is a dead zone.

Samuel Hughes [00:33:32] Yep, that's right. I mean we are, as the economist I work with like to say we are sitting on value here. It's, and it's, the nice thing about this area of politics is we are not really doing zero sum politics. We're not working out, okay, we're gonna try and smash this group and take some good away from them and give it to that group instead. Which is, you know, there is some politics that that has to happen in some cases. There are good reasons to do it, but it's really, really hard and everyone fights like phrases. Whereas we are trying to find ways where basically everyone wins from these kinds of policy changes. Places where we've just got a system here, which was designed for a different state, a different set of circumstances. It was a well-intentioned system, maybe it worked well at first, but now it's kind of malfunctioning and we need to find ways of changing this that work better for the whole community.

Vance Crowe [00:34:23] So one of the big issues that St. Louis is trying to fix where I live, but I think it's really going on in all cities in the United States is you have a, a group of people that say, Hey, we really wanna be able to do cycling. We want people to be able to ride their bikes but they can't because it's too dangerous. So now we've gotta create some space for them. But then by creating that space for cyclists, you're hoping that they'll use it. So you've taken up some amount of, of road space and congested those roads for bicyclists that may or may not be there. Help me think through what is the best way to find the balance here? If you don't have it built, you can't have cyclists, if you build it, you've taken a hell of a gamble and if the cyclists don't come, you've just really made your driving traffic. How should people think about challenges like this?

Samuel Hughes [00:35:07] Yeah, I mean this is a difficult one and of course this is the other kind of political problem, right? You've got so much road space and it's either going to the cyclists or it's going to the cars and whoever gets it, you know, is gonna be delighted, but whoever loses it is gonna scream like crazy. And so it's, the road space stuff is really difficult. The other issue, I mean the special difficulty with cyclists is when you start creating cycle lanes, they're often still, in a way they're a bit useless because until you've got quite a good network of cycle lanes, the first cycle lanes don't help you much. You take your cycle lane for a bit and then suddenly you find yourself again at a terrifying road junction, it's impossible to do anything with it. So, so it's what sometimes with cycle infrastructure, you have to stick it out for quite a while until people start using it. 'cause you really quite a lot of this stuff before it becomes useful at tool,

Vance Crowe [00:35:59] You do not have any children use this at all. The only people that could use it right now would be professional cyclists, but if you got a big enough network together, you could start seeing younger people, somebody in high school being able to use it. But we're years away from that. Decades maybe. Yeah,

Samuel Hughes [00:36:12] I mean there are, there's one country where they've really made this work, which is the Netherlands and the Netherlands. The proportion of people who cycle is amazingly high. It, it, it shows it is possible. It's not just a kind of fancy and the Netherlands, I mean that wouldn't be replicable in all American contexts because it's Netherlands is a multiple density populated country, but it will be replicable in some and it'll be replicable in most contexts in, in Britain, which is not, not very different in Netherlands in terms of population density. So, so it's, it is a, you can get there if you are, if there's, if there's commitment to to doing it. It's, I mean the other thing, the issue for us in, in European cities, and this is true in some older American cities as well, is our older cities were not built for cars and they just can't, I mean they are totally dysfunctional if you try, if everyone tries to get everywhere by driving. So we just don't have the road infrastructure to do that. The only way we could stop massive permanent congestion would be via the kinds of comprehensive replanning of city centers that you've got in America in the fifties and sixties is where like a lot of stuff gets bulldozed, big roads get run through it. That's never gonna happen anymore because I mean, it used, it happened used to happen a bit in this country, but nowadays no one would stand for that. So we are really stuck in a situation where cars are actually just too, too inefficient to way to move around our cities and we've got to find alternatives to that.

Samuel Hughes [00:37:52] That's a, and that's probably true for someone like New York. I think that would be the same in the states. In lots of American cities, the situation's a bit different and you'd be that, okay, there are some good reasons to encourage cycling because it's healthy other people and because it's less damaging to the environment, but the cities can function with cars. So that, and that respect for context is important here.

Vance Crowe [00:38:15] Right now when you talk about mass transit, the only way you can talk about it with the, say the middle and upper class that they will recognize this is something that they would value is that it helps you get to sporting events or some something that you, you know, do every once in a while. Otherwise public transportation is almost something you're doing for the poor. So you're, you're adding in bus lines or you're adding in a train line, but you're doing it because the people that don't have cars would need these because they're not using them as a, as a solution for some systemic traffic problem.

Samuel Hughes [00:38:49] Yeah, that's right. Where that is very different. I mean it very different in London where, I mean, virtually everyone takes a train and takes the bus and it's barristers and bankers and so on will take the land underground every morning. It's, but there are other parts of Britain which are a bit more like the situation in America. So I mean London is London to some extent. Some of the other big cities are very different, but lots parts of Britain, it's very hard to get around by public transport and it's hard to get around by bicycles and people there really, you know, they are really are quite reliant on driving by parents given the countryside. And for them to, to lose their car would be almost paralleled and at 20 minutes from the nearest shop would be paralyzing them. And that, you know, I'm, I am basically in favor of finding ways for cities to be less car based and for, you know, moving away for a lot of that. But I do think that sensitivity to context is important and one of the ways in which people, you know, advocates of public transport and cycling and walking lose a lot of support is by insensitivity to that and by, you know, talking about situations like my parents as though they're in the same situation that I'm in, living in, you know, the inner city of an old town where you, you can more or less get anywhere with public transport.

Vance Crowe [00:40:16] You also had another really interesting tweet where you showed places where you took out a little bit of street parking and, and not you, but one had taken out a little bit of street parking and they'd added trees in. And I mean, I am a huge fan of trees. I I study them, I plant them in my own yard. I'm, I'm, I go to places to look at them. To me that my heart sings when I see that. And a city street that has trees on it is so much more valuable, so much more welcoming, so much more calming than one that has no trees for as far as you can see. When you've put those things out there, how likely are you to, to believe that people are willing to give up parking forever in order to be able to have green space where they're, you know, living and working?

Samuel Hughes [00:40:58] Well, it depends. I mean the, i the one I did recently, and I came across this in a street in King's Cross, I mean, which did go, went crazy on Twitter. People were really fascinated by it. I think, I mean, for that street, they, they, I mean, King's Cross is right next to one of the main railway stations in Dunton. So they are an hour and a half or whatever it is, an hour and a half, two hours away by train from Paris within an hour of anywhere in London. They're an hour and a half from any of London's airports. I mean, they've got, and they, and within walking distance, obviously they've got a world class selection of, of workplaces, of restaurants, of cafes and all the rest. So these are like, if there's anyone in the world who could do without cars, it's people kind of living on this street in Kings Cross. And for them, I mean their street is so much more desirable now, I mean visually so much more desirable than it was before. I mean, they've probably got a load of property value from that. They're probably a lot better off than they were in, I mean, purely financial in the crudest sense than they were before that these trees were introduced. So if you're in that situation, I think, you know, even without approaching this idealistically, you can make a really straightforward case to, to a lot of residents may be very sympathetic to that your lives will be better if you do this. You don't, I mean, you may not even have a car. You may find it a very easy thing to give up and you'll benefit from this a lot in other ways.

Samuel Hughes [00:42:31] Obviously that's not everyone's situation. And there are lots of streets in England where if you take away people's parking spots and, and they're forced to sort of drive around for ages to find somewhere to park every evening, that is a real hit to their living standard. And it's, it's, and and then in those cases you can see why people say, look, this trade off is really tough and this isn't. So, so again, you know, when it comes to these, to these battles over things like what are we gonna do with the road space? We've all got to share this road space somehow we've got loads of different ways we want to use it. And that's how now we can have to fight over which way it does get used. Sensitivity to context is all important. And I think there are many more streets that could take trees and have 'em at the moment, but there will be somewhere it's going to be practically very difficult

Vance Crowe [00:43:22] Changing the subject you had a photograph in, and I believe it was a pretty famous cathedral in England, but I'm not, I I I don't remember it off the top of my head where you basically were like, this was planned to be this kind of mosaic tile where they could put up giant picturesque, you know, much more, but they didn't finish it, it's just brick. And now people have kind of come to expect that from it. That got me thinking about, do, do you know which one I'm talking about? Do you, do you remember,

Samuel Hughes [00:43:49] I'm not sure I do. Is this the floor?

Vance Crowe [00:43:52] It was the, it's the ceiling, so I believe it's in like a famous cathedral of your Oh

Samuel Hughes [00:43:56] Yes, yes. I do know what you mean. Yeah. That's Westminster Cathedral, the Roman Catholic cathedral of London. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:44:00] And so I was fascinated by this. In fact, I was like zooming up on my phone and trying to like look at it because normally you walk into a cathedral, St. Louis, the city I live in in the United States has this basilica and it is just enormous. And you look up and there's still more mosaics and things above you that are kind of, you know, picturesque and, but this one it's just black brick that's left there. Talk a little bit about that then I, I have some questions to worry about. Like why did they stop and, and yeah, keep going.

Samuel Hughes [00:44:32] Well, it's a simple case actually. They, so this is fantastic building from a little over a hundred years ago. And they, they built the structure, they started to face all the lower walls of the building with marbles and mosaics and, and then they ran outta money. And the upper part of the building was just left with structural dark structural brick. And I mean, it, it is an interesting ca the interesting case, it actually kind of works. It really, I mean it's, we do have the designs for the, the original coverings, which would've be, would be wonderful as well. But this created a very interesting effect of, you know, if you look normally it's a very, very, very crude rule in architecture. You create more sort of darkness and heaviness lower down and more light and refinement, higher up. And that's affected in most contexts. People tend to find satisfying. And here it's kind of been reversed, lower down, it's luminous and very richly decorated and above it's this massive dark brick. But it does have a strangely moving quality to it to have this. And you think maybe of the night sky, the vaults of heaven above you. It's, the tone is somber. But, but yeah, it's a powerful building and

Vance Crowe [00:45:59] The, the building is so big and it's just like any of the major cathedrals built probably in that same timeframe. It seems like almost impossible to imagine that someone would take the resources and the time to build another cathedral like that. Is that true or is that what everybody thinks until somebody has the bravado to go out and do it?

Samuel Hughes [00:46:21] Well we, I mean last big cathedrals in Britain, well the last cathedral in Britain was finished in the two thousands. Interestingly, this was the cathedral of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, which was a, it was a medieval building which came, it was upgraded to the status of a cathedral in the early 20th century. And there was lots of debate in brouhaha about what they were going to do. And they finally appointed one of the last gothic architects to, to do various extensions. They thought this is a cathedral, it ought to be a expanded and to, you know, to fit with its new dignity. And he did most of this work in the fifties, very, very good work. And then they ran outta money and then the architect himself left all of his fortune in his will to the diocese on condition that they use it to finish the cathedral. And they also got a little bit of money, I think from the millennium grants as a sort of money that was spent on interesting cultural product projects around the year 2000. So they finally, in the two thousands, one of his, the students of this last Catholic architect completed the designs and they finished a lovely, lovely cathedral in the middle of the East Anglia or in a, in a, in a, a small town in East Anglia, which was a, you know, a triumph of triumph of faith in England in our time. So it can still be done. It doesn't happen very often.

Samuel Hughes [00:47:53] I think maybe because of massively falling church attendance and because the resources just aren't there anymore. It probably does happen more often in the United States, I would've thought given that church attendance is, is still higher. It's happens,

Vance Crowe [00:48:08] The large churches that get built in the United States are built more like a sports complex or some sort of amphitheater than they are. So, you know, a lot of metal, a lot of cheap seating, you know, I'm sure I'm gonna get, get a little bit of heat for this, but a lot of them are built like the mega churches. If you weren't doing a church in there, you could probably do a play or something like that. But you don't go to outside to see the facade or the overall building 'cause it looks like oftentimes corrugated metal or something like that.

Samuel Hughes [00:48:37] Well, I'm, I'm sorry to hear that and I hope that's not, that's not the whole truth of the matter. There is, I mean, around the world, there's really interesting religious architecture in India, in Turkey, in some of the post-communist countries. So I remember traveling in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan a couple of years ago and in each of those countries, so extraordinary. Well, I mean, cathedrals in the first two and mosques in the third just going up in the last, in the last decades because religious feeling is still very strong in those countries. And because religious architecture was often stymied in the communist period. So they're now finally having a chance to express it. So there are places where, where wonderful work is being done of often though not always, the traditions of religious architecture have been interrupted. And that means it's often a bit uneven at first when people start doing this stuff again because the craft skills aren't there or because people are, you know, if people are starting to do work in a style they haven't worked in for a long time, often it looks a bit weird when they're first doing it's quite self-conscious or they exaggerate the details, but, but they're all, you know, settling in and getting much better at it very quickly. And there's amazing work being done now. But yeah, maybe not, not so much in Britain and, and last perhaps not so much in the United States, although I'm hoping to be correct on that.

Vance Crowe [00:50:05] I used to be, I used to live right across the street from the National Cathedral in Washington DC and they were still building that, right, that this has giant flying buttresses. It looks like a French cathedral. It's, it's beautiful. But one of the challenges that they had was, it's not money, it's expertise. Like we, there just aren't that many masons out there. There's just not that many people that know how to do tile. And you think about the fact that in a modern age, you actually could lose the technology for how to do some of these things. And I'm sure it's not just the masonry, it's probably how the architecture works in general.

Samuel Hughes [00:50:40] Yeah, I mean, could lose, I mean, have lost, there's, there's a huge issue with this and that's a lot of it. So some of this stuff, the good news there are, there is some good news here. So some good news is there are these old traditional forms that can sometimes now be produced much more cheaply and easily using modern technology. And that I've always strongly asserted, that's a wonderful thing. We should make every use of that. Now people discover this first in 19th century when they worked out things like cast ions started being used in a big way or they've made greater use of some stucco molded forms. Those cast forms. All you do is you melt down some plaster or some metal, you pour it into a mold and then you've got it. So you've got one mold and you can just produce huge quantities of stuff repetitively in this way. And now you can do some of this stuff with lasers and with all sorts of, you know, 3D printing is likely to come important. So that's really helpful and will mean that more of this great stuff can be done without, even, even in cases where we've lost the skills that were originally necessary forward. The other thing is that, you know, we can train people up again. And there have been, there were cases like in Berlin, they recently rebuilt the old Brock Palace in the center of the city that I think required for a lot of, I mean some of these skills necessary to build it had been completely, or almost completely lost. So a new generation of craftspeople just learnt or relearnt these skills for the purposes of this one building and then they can transfer it and do it for other buildings.

Samuel Hughes [00:52:21] But it's not, you know, if the demand's there, eventually we can, we can get the skills together. I think that's, I'd a, it's a tricky and difficult problem, but I, I don't think it's an, a super cool one

Vance Crowe [00:52:35] That's a very hopeful perspective. Last week I had a, an artist on named a Alex Dodge. And Alex was pointing out that in Japan, many of their printmaking, which has made Japan, you know, famous, that's, that's one of their art forms. There's only two people left in the whole country that really know how to do this printmaking. And they got to the point where they thought it was a national emergency and so they funded people to learn it because they were like, oh gosh, if we lose this, there are things that it would take you generations to discover. 'cause that's how long it took for them to, to put it together to begin with. So I'm glad to hear you're more hopeful view of it.

Samuel Hughes [00:53:12] I'm a very hopeful person, but when you

Vance Crowe [00:53:15] Think about hope, you know, in the past. It used to be the, either the, the church or the state that would do giant buildings. And so we've already talked about, at least in the West, declining people going to church. Government has grown. But it seems to me unlikely that people have the political appetite to do giant government buildings. How mu how should a government think about if you're trying to make a courthouse or you're trying to make a a civil servant building, how much should they put into making that thing beautiful.

Samuel Hughes [00:53:48] I mean, depends to some extent on the building, but it is, I, there's a lovely book called Good and Bad Manners in Architecture. Written is totally forgotten now. It's once influential in this country. And the inter was very

Vance Crowe [00:54:02] British though. Yes, it,

Samuel Hughes [00:54:04] Well it was belch actually. Tristan Edwards. He was, yes. And he said, you know, we should, you will get told by people, oh, well you, you want to, you know, care out what the building looks like. The important thing is just the functionality of the building, the internal contents, questions of cost, questions of, you know, user, user enjoyment and stuff. And he said, well, this is, in this way, it's a deeply unc conception of architecture. Because the great majority of people in the way they experience a building, at least if the building is, you know, there in the middle of a city, if it's integrated with a wider relevant fabric, great majority of people will never go inside. All they will see is the outside of the building. And they will have to either endure that or they will receive that as a, you know, little blessing that the building. So if you have a civic conception of architecture, you think, yes, it is worth taking pains and making some sacrifices to ensure that the outer aspect of the building is a blessing to all the streets and all the people around it. Because of course, for most people, that's the only part of the building they're ever, they're ever going to experience. And I think, you know, that is, yeah, I think it's very important. And I think we are slowly moving back towards that. I mean, the, the kind of idea that you had, I think in some cases in the fifties and sixties, that, well, the, the street is kind of over. We're not gonna worry about the old corridor streets of cities. We are gonna have a government place and people will drive to go to their government center and then they'll go into the buildings.

Samuel Hughes [00:55:38] No one will ever be really have to look at these buildings on the outside 'cause you're gonna drive into them and drive out of them. And, and then we can just really care about, you know, the various functional features, internal functional features of buildings. I think, I mean, at least in the way aspirationally people are moving away from that. I mean, in practice they end up still doing that quite a lot. But it'd be probably quite hard pressed to find someone who would actually kind of publicly come out and say, yeah, that's how we should approach cities and architecture nowadays. So I, yeah, I mean I, I I, I think it matters deeply and I think increasingly many people have come to that conclusion and yeah, I, over decades thought practice is lagging behind

Vance Crowe [00:56:20] In the United States when you go through the Midwest, like the place where I grew up and the towns that are similar to it, you know, just like 4,000 people or something like that. You have these beautiful courthouses that I just cannot imagine in today's day and age you could have built again. But to your point, I don't, I think maybe I've been in that courthouse one time in my whole life and I lived more, like less than three blocks away from it. But my entire experience of it, in fact, my experience of the way I think of my town is the image of that building. And so thinking about the outside being kind of the, the, the artwork facing side of it makes a ton of sense to me.

Samuel Hughes [00:56:57] Yeah. I think that's the question of how, how much people identify with buildings and how it affects their sense of, you know, their pride in their, in their, in their city and their community, and how the building comes to seem like a symbol of the, of the place. I think it, yeah, it's very important indeed. And that's, it is interesting. I mean, we were told, I, when I was on the, this government commission about beautiful buildings, I'm being told, and I heard this twice now, people saying about hospitals, someone who was involved in the hospital design, they came up with a certain design for this building and they were told by the commissioning authority, ah, that's, that's no good. I'm afraid that looks too expensive. You need to do something else, which may in fact be more expensive so that it looks cheaper. 'cause otherwise people will think we've been propagate and wasteful and that we are caring about appearances rather than in, you know, inside of the building. And, and that, that's a very strange way to approach commissioning of public buildings. But, you know, we've, it

Vance Crowe [00:58:02] Makes, it makes you wonder if, if democracy is a hard place to make beautiful buildings, right? Because the authoritarian or the, you know, the single-minded person in a government can much more easily make those things happen without the fear of, of poll numbers dipping because something looks too fancy.

Samuel Hughes [00:58:20] But your country is a great disprove of this. I mean, no country in the world has more wonderful civic architecture than the United States generations and generations of, of, of beautiful democratic municipal architecture. And in fact, that's true more generally in, in, in Europe there's lots of European, I mean lots of European countries have been democracy, certainly since the 19th century and had long periods of civic architecture, which is very widely popular. And lots of European cities were sort of semi democratic going all the way back to the Middle Ages. I mean, quite a few of the cathedrals, if they were often built through subscriptions from the guilds to the different guilds of the city. So it was like industry groups, they would all band together and they would want to build a cathedral and then they would compete for the honor of being the guild who was going to fund this part of the cathedral or that part of the cathedral. But the resources came from, from ordinary people were an expression of their, of their faith and their pride, a huge investment of, I mean, medieval cities weren't completely democratic, but, but, but, but they weren't autocracies. They were sort of hierarchical, but, but representative, you know, they are kind of hierarchical representative institutions that they would've by and those yeah, were, were produce much of the best architecture that we know. So yeah, no, I'm, I'm a big fan. I, I'm, I think as, as Topville said, that democracy is perfectly consistent with the highest levels of achievement in the arts.

Vance Crowe [00:59:57] Well, I think that is a great place to, to leave it off because it's a hopeful note about democracy that I think right now, probably everybody needs to hear a little bit of like, Hey, we can do really great things even though we've gotta figure out a way to work together. There's no obvious or easy solutions, but, but when done, we can build these great civic, beautiful buildings.

Samuel Hughes [01:00:19] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:00:20] Well, Samuel, thank you so much for coming on. If people wanted to follow your Twitter or learn more about your work, where would they go to do that?

Samuel Hughes [01:00:28] Well, Twitter is what is my Twitter tag, SCP and then the little line, and then Hughes, I think

Vance Crowe [01:00:36] I'll put it in the show notes so people can

Samuel Hughes [01:00:38] Put it in the show notes. I'd be delighted and I'm always very keen to hear from people and, and keen to, to talk to anyone. So yeah, I've been, it's been a great pleasure.

Vance Crowe [01:00:49] Thank you so much for coming on. Thank

Samuel Hughes [01:00:50] You very much indeed.