The conclusion looks at early nineteenth-century invocations of John Gay’s Trivia as a way of marking the past from the present, before looking in more detail at one work that draws on Gay’s poem in this way. Metropolitan Improvements; or London in the Nineteenth Century celebrates the development and improvements that were reshaping the West End, drawing a distinction between the London described by Gay and Hogarth and the city of “our improved days”. As it surveys the new buildings, streets, canals, and parks that were transforming the cityscape, James Elmes confidently asserts that London in the nineteenth century will be the admiration of foreigners and the text seemingly resolves many of the tensions highlighted in previous chapters between an ideal of the city and its commercial character.

Chapter 10 zooms in on resistance in public-housing estates, a most unlikely setting because residents are transient and vulnerable. The chapter presents two pairs of cases, in Toronto and Melbourne, each city displaying a success and a failure in both mobilization and impact. The Toronto cases show how cultural producers engaged in boosterish programming that distracted public opinion from ongoing displacement in one site, while, in the other, experiential tools and preexisting networks combined to foster a strong residents’ voice in revitalization plans and prevented displacement. The analysis of Melbourne’s estates confirms the powerful role of union support and shows how a councillor’s ideology gains salience in the context of multimember districts.