Prof. Matthew McCartney
Well, apart from medicine, irrigation, health, roads, cheese and education, baths and the Circus Maximus, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Monty Python and the Life of Brian, 1979)
// Preface: The inaugural Professional Diploma in Urban Development at the AUL is now complete. The students, teachers, and observing AUL staff are veterans two courses, Strategic Urban Planning (taught by Nuria Forqués Puigcerver) and Topics in Urban Governance (taught by Dr. Patrick Lamson-Hall). Students from across Africa, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, South Sudan, Kenya, Guinea, brought with them a diversity of professional African urban experience.
We have an underlying philosophy at the Africa Urban Lab (AUL) to prioritize instruction of African case studies, using African data to better understand African urbanization. However, this is not to exclusion of other case studies where and when relevant. During the first module, we explored the historical case of British urbanization, looked at city plans of Barcelona (Spain), Medelin (Colombia), and New York (US).
This blog makes a case for finding teaching and research relevance in the strangest places. In doing so, it seeks to answer a question. What does a 5,000-year-old road in England tell us about the governance of England over those centuries and how does its story help Africa think about its own urbanization in the next century? This blog learns and draws lessons from the observation of a real-world urban (?) planning regime.[1]
Amidst the dark satanic mills of foggy London, on a sodden rainy day in the bleak mid-winter (I exaggerate, but those familiar with the rigors of London weather will recognize a generous dollop of ‘truth’ here), it is easy for the heart and mind to long for the glorious countryside. Thanks to the 15 national trails that cover every corner of the UK, this is easily possible.
A national trail is an officially designated long-distance walk, ranging in length from the 630 miles of the South West Coastal Path to the 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall Path, through glorious rolling green countryside, dramatic coastal cliffs, or heather-filled moorland. They are waymarked by a distinctive acorn symbol and looked after in the main by enthusiastic volunteers.
In late 2023 and in both May and September 2024, I walked all 140 kilometres of Ridgeway national trail, which connects the towns of Avebury and Ivinghoe Beacon. The Ridgeway is part of a much longer 582-kilometre ancient road that runs from South East to East England, known as the Greater Ridgeway. Only two parts of the path have been converted into official trails. The second, further north is the Peddars Way. The Ridgeway is not a name of poetic imagination; it is a name of resolute practicality. For most of the route, the road runs atop a physical ridge. The lack of poetry in the name is made up for by the beautiful views this affords a thirsty and footsore walker.
At other times the road plunges into the depths of dimly green woods and feels more like a subterranean tunnel.
The Ridgeway is known as Britain’s oldest road and has been in use for 5,000 years by traders, soldiers, tax collectors, and herdsmen, and more recently itinerant researchers from the AUL. Although this seems old, the real origins of the road are really old. The Ridgeway trail is a white-chalk path running through luscious green countryside. The chalk indicates that this was once a seabed. The chalk was originally microscopic plankton falling to the seafloor at the rate of 1mm per century over the course of 35 million years.
How does the Ridgeway teach us about urban planning in England over the last 5,000 years?
British history, like its resolutely bland cooking, is marked by the general absence of domestic political upheavals. We can read this political history from the Ridgeway in two ways.
Firstly, save for a few historical interludes, Britain has been spared periods of political upheaval, or outright political anarchy. Those key exceptions, include i) after the end of Roman-ruled Britain in 410 CE and the subsequent chaotic plunder and invasion of Britain by Jutes, Saxons, Anglos, and other axe-wielding holidaymakers from northern Europe, and ii) during the Wars of the Roses (between 1455 and 1487 CE), when rival claimants from the families of York and Lancaster fought for the crown of England. This family argument – replete with swords, slaughter, and very awkward family Christmas reunions – incidentally, was the historical inspiration for the book and television series, the Game of Thrones.
How do we read this domestic political stability into the Ridgeway? Britain has had several thousand years of generally functioning government. As a result, public infrastructure like the Ridgeway, has been consistently maintained and protected (and not encroached on by landowners). Town-planning laws have been effectively enforced, meaning there is glorious empty countryside by train 30 minutes in every direction from the center of London. This planning regime is underpinned by the maintenance of green-belts around towns, including London, that prohibit new construction activity. By comparison, towns in more loosely governed countries, like India, tend to continuously sprawl as governments are unable to enforce planning regulations.
Secondly, besides the years of Roman colonial military dictatorship (43-410 CE), Britain has been ruled by generally moderate government. Britain was spared the absolutism of Spanish or French monarchies and the totalitarianism of Hitler in Germany or Mao in China. One study of more than one-thousand African cities found that autocratic dictators tend to build straight roads – they are better able to ignore existing property rights and build geometrically pleasing gridded streets. Not so in Britain, where even the strongest Kings and Queens or Prime Ministers have generally been forced to accept existing property rights and go through a somewhat independent legal system to purchase property. There are of course exceptions, including the Romans, and Henry VIII, King of England (1509-1547 CE), who dissolved the system of religious monasteries in England and grabbed their lands.
How do we read this moderation into the Ridgeway? The Ridgeway, like roads generally in England, from prehistoric, to ancient, to modern times, tend to meander and wriggle across the countryside, or through cities. They have to respect private property rights. There is more wriggle in the Ridgeway than in an evasive answer in a televised US presidential debate. The major exceptions, as noted, were those Romans. The Romans were free from democratic constraints or political ties to local group and so were able to build straight roads to connect their towns and ease the rapid travel of their army of occupation.
One startling demonstration of how even Prime Ministers have had to abide by existing property rights can be seen in the case of Chequers. Since 1921, the sixteenth century mansion and estate of Chequers has been the country residence of the UK Prime Minister. Amidst expansive rolling hills and green woods, Chequers has served as the tranquil escape for busy Prime Ministers and as a location for discrete conversation with foreign luminaries including both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Ridgeway Trail runs straight through the Chequers estate. There is a knee-high fence, a few security warnings, but otherwise walkers can quite happily traipse through the Prime Ministers (extended) garden and gaze along the drive towards his/her house. Ever since the Prime Minister acquired the estate in 1921, the office has been compelled to recognize and adapt to the route of this ancient road.
As delightful and humbling as this evident manifestation of constraints on the power of the executive can be, there are costs. The high-speed railway (HS2) to connect London to Birmingham has seen its projected costs escalate from £32 billion (US$42 billion in 2011 to £80 billion (US$105 billion) by 2019. Much of this was a consequence of the slow, expensive, and legalistic means the government is compelled to undertake in order to acquire private land for public purposes.
What else can we learn from the Ridgeway?
Roads, railways, sewerage systems and other big infrastructure projects have an immense lock-in effect – where they are built today has a profound impact on the evolution of economic processes such as urbanization, over not just decades, but over centuries. Going back to Roman roads two thousand years ago, there is plenty of rigorous empirical evidence to demonstrate this.
At the peak of the Roman Empire, 113 provinces across Europe were connected by 372 main roads, which linked every (modern) country between Scotland and Iraq, including west of the Rhine, south of the Danube, and north of the Sahara. At the peak of the Roman Empire, when Emperor Trajan died in 117 CE, it is estimated that the empire hosted 50,000 miles of paved roads. One study used nighttime light intensity from satellite data and found that in 2010 CE, 1,500 years after the final collapse of the Roman empire, there was more economic development in those parts of Europe with a greater density of Roman roads.
Don’t be deceived by the empty countryside in the photos above. The Ridgeway is teeming with signs of historical urbanization. For most of its 5,000-year history, the Ridgeway was a busy urban population center (which finally explains the somewhat enigmatic (?) in the opening paragraph to this blog).
The photos below, for example, show the remains of Uffington Castle, an iron-age hillfort on the Ridgeway that was built around 800 BCE. Its resident lords would have sourced a nice revenue providing protection to traders and herdsmen trapsing along the road in return for the payment of tolls. The town of Avebury, at the start of the Ridgeway, is a world heritage site containing a stone circle of up to one hundred stones dating back to around 2850 BCE. It was then a nationally-prominent religious center. Elsewhere, there are the remains of hillforts, bronze age barrows, and neolithic burial chambers strewn along the length of the Ridgeway. These tombs made pleasant places to sleep for noted eccentric academic and barefooted British walker Robert MacFarlane.
The age of hillforts came to an end in Britain after the Romans invaded in 43 CE and then oddly, decided to spend the next 350 years ruling the colony of grey drizzle so far from their warm and gourmand Mediterranean homeland. The resulting Pax Romana brought road building, urbanization, trade and prosperity. The grunting and badly-fed locals eventually descended from their cold hillforts to become, Latin-speaking, bath- and circus-attending, olive- and wine-consuming urban Romans.
In 410 CE, the last Romans departed and Britain descended into chaos and anarchy – one of the few interludes of domestic political upheaval. Towns declined and the hillforts along the Ridgeway were restored and re-occupied as defensive bastions. Away with the olive and back to boiled beef it was! The single individual who was most responsible for ending the anarchy, uniting various warring kingdoms into an English state, and returning the capital to London was King Alfred (849-899 CE).
The story of King Alfred shows how the Ridgeway had resumed its central place in politics, urbanization, trade, and warfare after the Roman departure. Alfred was born in what is now the village of Wantage just off the Ridgeway (I spent the night here between days of walking) and he won the decisive Battle of Edington against Viking invaders not far from the contours of the Ridgeway. For those accomplishments (and doing much to promote education), he is known as Alfred the Great – the only English monarch with such a title.
The Ridgeway is a glorious walk, reading the persistence of the road as a piece of infrastructure juxtaposed against the way it wriggles around existing property tells us a lot about the urban planning history of England. The manner in which the Ridgeway has influenced patterns of urbanization over the centuries gives us another big story.
By 2050, the UN predicts that the global urban population will increase by 2.6 billion people. 96% of the increase in global urban population by 2050 will occur in developing countries. There is good reason for optimism. Cities do not make people poor; they attract poor people with the prospect of improving their situation in life. Historically, GDP per capita and urbanization have increased together. Countries that experience an acceleration of economic growth, such as China after 1980, also experience accelerated urbanization.
The link between urbanization and economic development is not automatic. Since the 1970s, the link between urbanization, economic growth, and industrialization has broken down in Africa. African cities are characterized by contagion (exposure to communicable diseases through poor water, sanitation, and hygiene), crime, and congestion. For example, 60% of Africa’s urban population lives in slums and people spend hours each day in traffic.
Many of these new urbanites will move to completely new cities. Much of the Global South is experiencing an unprecedented wave of new city construction. Between 2000 and 2020, 159 new city projects have been announced, compared to 126 in the entire period from 1945 to 1999. Only six of these are in the Global North, compared to 50 in East Asia and the Pacific, 49 in the Middle East and North Africa, and 43 in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Ridgeway tells us that planning decisions made about constructing big urban infrastructure today will impact economic development – particularly patterns of urbanization – not just for decades, but for centuries to come. Will these new cities be built with adequate land preserved for transport infrastructure, including roads and railways, or will they be locked into the long-term, strangulating embrace of congestion? Will these new cities build adequate sewage systems (digging up land for pipes is ruinously expensive once houses and factories are built), or will they be condemned to a future of contagion from water-borne disease?
Looking back at the history of Britain’s oldest road informs us about the importance of making good planning decisions today: build good new cities today so the future of urbanization will contribute to human flourishing.
Good public infrastructure not only accrues large-scale benefits, but it can directly impact the well-being of the individual as well. Consider my walk. Certainly, it was “hard work” (grueling research!), but I gained new insights about urbanization from a real-world planning regime, which can only be of benefit to the research plans and teaching schedule of the AUL. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a few jolly days walking and nights in the pub with friends. Such intangibles are the happy by-product of productive urbanization, well-maintained property rights, and a good public walking path.
[1] Thanks to Marko Kecman, Daryl Burnaby, Alan Parkin, Ashwin Roy, Steve Buchanan, Al Tompson, and Dan Secretan for photo credits and convivial companionship on the Ridgeway.
