As we have seen, attempts to improve the city were rarely limited to the material substance of buildings, roads and bridges. A central and often explicit aim of urban reform was the transformation of the people. That this could be accomplished through alteration of living environments was an important belief of the period and a necessary foundation for the reform of housing, and the urban scene more generally in the nineteenth century.

Since an improved people was fundamental to any project of improving the nation, a number of strategies for reducing and containing social problems, and for raising the material and moral conditions of the people, were developed. One rather passive strategy was to concentrate on improving the middle classes and their manufactures, environments and behaviours, in the belief that the provision of a model for emulation would encourage all the social orders to pursue the same ends, or that members of an improved middle class would assume responsibility for reforming the conditions and practices of their employees. But other, more active and paternalistic strategies were also pursued.

In the eighteenth century improvement at an individual level was accomplished through attention to the self and owed nothing to intervention by other people. Numerous texts provided advice and precepts by which the reader (usually assumed to be middle class) could work at their own improvement (see the table in Chapter One). The self might be improved through the development of skills and accomplishments, or through disciplining their own character and behaviour.