There were some philosophical musings about how the city, which historically had been important as a place of common defense and safety, was now the most vulnerable place. But the age-old economic factors (cost of land, availability of labor, proximity to suppliers and customers) and environmental forces (desire to escape dirty, crowded center cities) were much stronger than any central planning edicts, which ranged from moderately strong in the UK to nonexistent in the US, with most Western European nations somewhere in between.