As mayor of Birmingham from 1873 Chamberlain bought out the town's private gas and water companies, holding that a network with only one set of pipes is a natural monopoly and that monopolies sustained by the state ought to be in the hands of the people's representatives. Gas profits then helped fund the Improvement Scheme that drove Corporation Street through the central slums. The model spread as municipal trading: water, gas, electricity, trams, baths, markets, abattoirs and eventually housing, run by the corporation and financed by rates and municipal loans. Continental cities went further, adding municipal land banks and ground leases to the same logic.
It established infrastructure as a public good and the utility as a municipal monopoly, giving cities both the revenue and the legal reach to plan - the pipe, the tram line and the land bank became instruments of urban policy rather than private assets. The reverse move a century later, privatisation and unbundling, is precisely what Splintering Urbanism describes.
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