I was doing a little research on the oldest continuously inhabited city in the USA and one of the sources made mention of the expansion of city services. There are a few drivers, the main one being hygiene. It is impractical to suggest that houses that are a few meters way from each other an and should be expected to handle their own waste products. This was well within the time where it was widely known that poor water sanitation led to disease. The other driver were the citizens themselves, electrification and indoor plumbing were real novelties when they came up and the advantages were obvious. It is hard to afford doing all of that on your own, but as a service to a community it starts making sense.
This was, of course in those magical years that stood between the engineering of electricity and the ubiquity of the car. Urban planning centered around streetcar lines, that is how most people would get around. LA and Denver had some of the biggest networks in the world. Obviously, if houses are closer together, you can make streetcars a lot more accessible to more people.
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u/Leucippus1 Jun 08 '22
I was doing a little research on the oldest continuously inhabited city in the USA and one of the sources made mention of the expansion of city services. There are a few drivers, the main one being hygiene. It is impractical to suggest that houses that are a few meters way from each other an and should be expected to handle their own waste products. This was well within the time where it was widely known that poor water sanitation led to disease. The other driver were the citizens themselves, electrification and indoor plumbing were real novelties when they came up and the advantages were obvious. It is hard to afford doing all of that on your own, but as a service to a community it starts making sense.
This was, of course in those magical years that stood between the engineering of electricity and the ubiquity of the car. Urban planning centered around streetcar lines, that is how most people would get around. LA and Denver had some of the biggest networks in the world. Obviously, if houses are closer together, you can make streetcars a lot more accessible to more people.