From Sewers to Suburbs

Central city infrastructure development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in areas such as sewerage, water works, street lighting, and street pavement, was an important cause of suburban municipal autonomy by the time of the Great Depression. Suburban autonomy was in turn an important factor in the racial and economic transformations that were visible in central cities by the 1950s. Thus, although central city infrastructure development was a classic developmental policy, it led to a central city politics that emphasized fiscal retrenchment and racialized poverty. This argument provides an important new perspective to the study of urban politics because it suggests that suburban autonomy was an intermediate process by which city policies transformed the context in which they were initially formulated. Evidence is provided for this argument through four OLS regression models that indicate a statistically significant relationship between central city infrastructure development in 1907 and suburban population growth in the 1930s and 1940s

Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Autonomy · Central city · Civil engineering · Context (archaeology · Decentralization · Development economics · Economic geography · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political science · Politics · Population · Retrenchment · Sewerage · Sociology · Urban planning · Demography · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth · Housing Market and Economics · Law · Public Administration · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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• Metropolitics

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• Separate and Unequal

  Open Access•Richard Hills, Richard Child Hill•American Political Science Review•1974

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