sample essays of IELTS

09 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 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.