Suburbanization
If by "suburb" is meant an urban margin that grows
more rapidly than its already developed interior, the process of
suburbanization began during the emergence of the industrial city in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century. Before that period the city was a small
highly compact cluster in which people moved about on foot and goods were
conveyed by horse and cart. But the early factories built in the 1830's and 1840’s
were located along waterways and near railheads at the edges of cities, and
housing was needed for the thousands of people drawn by the prospect of
employment. In time, the factories were surrounded by proliferating mill towns
of apartments and row houses that abutted the older, main cities. As a defense
against this encroachment and to enlarge their tax bases, the cities appropriated
their industrial neighbors. In 1854, for example, the city of Philadelphia
annexed most of Philadelphia
County. Similar municipal
maneuvers took place in Chicago and in New York. Indeed, most
great cities of the United
States achieved such status only by
incorporating the communities along their borders.
With the acceleration of industrial growth came acute urban crowding and accompanying social stress -- conditions that began to approach disastrous proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially successful electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse-drawn trolleys were retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connected every major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that transformed the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first phase of mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of the urban Middle Class, whose desires for homeownership in neighborhoods far from the aging inner city were satisfied by the developers of single-family housing tracts.
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