Up until 1750, London had a population of no more than three quarters of a million people, and worked in tandem with the country, town hall and market square dominating the network of mixed use buildings around them. The definition of public and private realm was blurred with a continuum of external and internal meeting spaces, as exemplified in Nollis 1748 plan of Rome. For over two hundred years, from 1750 to the 1950s, society was in an industrial economy. Where the resource was materials, the output products, the assets machinery, and the institutions companies. This was the era of the Victorian industrialist, such as Sir Titus Salt, who from the riches of manufacturing developed a model community around the factory.
Cities become the focus for prosperity.
With improved transport primarily by canal and later by railway, industry grew around node points and became a focus for employment. London by 1850 was a city of over 2.5 million, and Leeds had expanded from 10,000 at the end of the 18th century to a city of 370,000 by the end of the 19th century. By the early 1930s a third economic wave was upon us. The service economy of office clerks and professionals. The resources were people, the assets institutions, and the institutions bureaucracies.