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If by suburb is meant an urban margin that grows more rapidlythan its already developed interior, the process of suburbanization beganduring the emergence of the industrial city in the second quarter of thenineteenth century. Before that period the city was a small highly compactcluster in which people moved about on foot and goods were conveyed byhorse and cart. But the early factories built in the 1830s and 1840s were located along waterways and near railheads at the edges of cities, and housingwas needed for the thousands of people drawn by the prospect of employment. Intime, the factories were surrounded by proliferating mill towns ofapartments and row houses that abutted the older, main cities. As a defense against this encroachment and to enlarge theirtax bases, the cities appropriated their industrial neighbors.In1854, for example, the city of Philadelphia annexed most of Philadelphia County. Similar municipal maneuvers took place in Chicago and in New York. Indeed, mostgreat cities of the United States achieved such status only byincorporating the communities along their borders. With theacceleration of industrial growth came acute urban crowding andaccompanying social stress -- conditions that began to approach disastrousproportions when, in 1888, the first commercially successful electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse-drawn trolleyswere retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connectedevery major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that transformed the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis.Thisfirst phase of mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of the urban Middle Class, whose desires forhomeownership in neighborhoods far from the aging inner city were satisfied bythe developers of single-family housingtracts. | 
