London, England, and New York, USA, used suburbanization to address the urban overcrowding caused by industrialization in the 19th century, enabling both cities to achieve successful urban development based on expanded public transportation and zoning policies.
London, the heart of England, the land of the sun, Oxford, and Shakespeare, and New York, the financial center of the world and an indispensable city in the early development of the United States, often referred to as the second capital of the United States. These cities have undergone numerous developments to become the metropolises they are today. While these megacities have many different characteristics, one interesting thing they all have in common is the development of their suburbs. However, without the numerous efforts to develop suburbs during the industrialization era, when everything was centered in the city center, these cities would not be where they are today.
Europe rode the wave of the industrialization era. During the reign of Queen Victoria, as the population boomed and the ravages of industrialization led to the spread of slums, these problems began to be gradually addressed through the efforts of many municipal reformers and legal financiers. The suburbanization policies that took place in this historical context focused on decentralizing cities. The basic idea behind suburbanization was to build housing or factories on the outskirts of cities and connect them to the center. They also sought to accelerate suburbanization by developing new transportation technologies and lowering the cost of new housing with cheaper labor and resources. Let’s look at London, which was the first city to suburbanize and did so more effectively than others.
In London, suburban development was initiated by the London County Council. In the early 1900s, Britain’s burgeoning population had made London overcrowded and everything was concentrated in the center. Booth, a British urban planner at the time, thought the only way to solve this overcrowding was with improved transportation. The Progressive Party in the London Assembly embraced this idea, and after gaining the power to develop outlying areas, they started work on four complexes. They began laying trains in Totem Downfield, Norbury, Totenham, and Old Oak, but only Old Oak was successful. There are varying views on the success of the Old Oak area, but the general consensus is that the policy was only effective for the wealthy, as rents in the suburbs and the cost of using the subway were much higher than rents in the inner-city slums. Nevertheless, large-scale urban planning in Britain resulted in high standards of architecture. Meanwhile, in other large British cities, unlike London, there was a perception that private housing would solve the problem, and there was a lack of city-level effort. Eventually, legislation was passed to allow private developers to operate autonomously, and local authorities were given clear authority over newly built housing.
The London legislature never abandoned the idea that subways were effective in spreading suburbs. After World War I, public transportation emerged as the most important resource, and attempts to leverage it grew. Americans began to get involved in these transit projects, and they recognized the commercial value of land along streetcar lines and began laying out streetcar lines deliberately to develop suburbs around the lines. In many cities, including London, legislation was passed to allow private developers to operate autonomously, so these activities were not legally regulated. Out of this process emerged one of the greatest urban transit management teams in history, Frank Pick and Albert Stanley, who developed bus routes that began at the terminus of the Underground and constantly examined the feasibility of new rail services. The result was a massive rail network that crisscrossed the entire city and was quite successful. Of course, it was limited by high fares, but it was through this process that London became suburbanized.
In New York, suburbanization was achieved through a concept called zoning. Unlike London, which has a relatively long history, New York, which has a relatively short history, has achieved a better level of suburbanization than London. In urban planning or architectural design, zoning refers to the division of space into functional areas based on use and legal regulations, and New York was able to do this because it had much more land than London. New York’s suburbanization was concentrated in three areas – Lake Forest, Riverside, and Forest Hill Gardens – and while the city quickly moved basic facilities to the outskirts, it was limited by the fact that not many people lived in the suburbs, so few benefited.
Prior to zoning, New York’s urban planners developed the world’s first fastest subway, reaching speeds of 40 miles per hour, to address the rapid growth of the city and its population, as well as the city’s complex topography. At the time, New York was the world’s second-largest megacity and was initially made up of several islands due to rugged waterways. However, as in many other cities, the cost of moving to the suburbs was much higher than renting in the inner-city slums, so only high-income residents could afford to own single-family homes in the suburbs, while poorer workers were still forced to stay in the overcrowded city center. In addition, public transportation was often referred to as a “double-edged sword” in urban planning: it was an effective means of moving people to the suburbs, but it also served to accelerate overcrowding in the city center. New York needed a new solution, and zoning was the answer.
Benjamin C. Marsh, the executive director of the New York City Commission, a lawyer, and social reformer, had been impressed by zoning in Frankfurt, Germany, and was inspired to bring it to New York. Although zoning was already practiced in other cities at the time, New York was the first to adopt the German style of zoning. Zoning first began as a regulation of land use and building height, and its introduction is considered one of the most significant developments in American history. Manhattan was still the commercial center of the United States and the world at the time, so it was fundamentally different from the rest of the country. Commerce was more important than residential, and the volume and size of buildings were more important than anywhere else.
The practice of zoning originated in the commercial district of Manhattan, where employees of upscale storefronts began to utilize zoning to protect their property values. In short, zoning is the practice of dividing up areas and assigning them to people, and because it played such an important role in the competing interests of merchants, they supported it to protect their interests. As zoning became more widespread, it was legislated to regulate the private use of land for the health, safety, ethics, and welfare of the community, not just for the benefit of merchants. Americans were particularly positive about it, more so than Germany, the home of zoning, because of the self-interest that prevailed in early American development: they used zoning as a shield to preserve their own property values in a time of turmoil with immigrants coming from all over the world, and where zoning was in place, property values stabilized and actually increased.
In London, transportation technology and the efforts of the state legislature, and in New York, zoning as a means of protecting the interests of powerful merchants, led to the beginnings of suburbanization. From these beginnings, New York and London, the twin mountains of suburbanization, with their cheap labor and resources, succeeded in suburbanizing. The development of these cities is fascinating, and the process has influenced many others.
