Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Have big cities had their day?

iStock 
issue 19 September 2020

About 15 years ago I noticed a few surviving chattel houses in Barbados and wondered what they were. As it turns out, they were an ingenious solution to an age-old problem. These tiny yet exquisite buildings, with barely room for a bed, chair and stove, owe their origins to the abolition of slavery. Though a plantation owner was obliged to pay a wage to freed slaves, he retained ownership of the land. A form of pseudo-slavery emerged, where workers were charged rent more or less equal to their pay (like workers under 30 in London). The ingenious response was to build houses light enough to be portable. You could then carry them to nearby land where rent was lower.

Alastair Parvin (of WikiHouse) and I recently coined the phrase ‘techno–Georgism’ to describe anything which limits the extractive power of landlords, in a nod to the 19th-century Georgist movement (named after the economist Henry George).

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