FROM SEWERS TO SUBURBS Transforming the Policy-Making Context of American Cities

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.