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The Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, today has over one hundred forty thousand residents and is considered a “boomburb” because of its double-digit percentage growth over several decades. How did it reach this point? Explanations of urban growth—including the Chicago School and political economy perspectives; categories of suburbs, like boomburbs and edge cities; and narratives within Naperville itself—highlight different mechanisms at work. This study considers the factors that influenced Naperville’s growth and how each narrative fits the suburb’s development. The implications for future studies of suburban growth include the unpredictability of growth as it is happening, recognizing the limits of categorizing suburbs, undertaking comparative studies of suburbs across types or within regions, and not relying heavily on analyses of suburban outliers and unusual cases (like Naperville). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how tramways were publically appropriated, in what way people responded to the new modes of transport, and how they integrated them into their lives and urban environments. The approach of public appropriation shifts the focus away from the technology and tramway companies to the users of the new modes and opens the field to the analysis of the interrelationship between transport technology and urban cultures in a comparative perspective. The study concludes that people were more critical of horse than of electric tramways. The often-quoted “massive public opposition” to electrification turns out to be much weaker than hitherto assumed. Only by the mid-1910s had the urban masses, upper classes, and workers fully appropriated them as modes to serve their working and leisure habits, as fashionable and as a very positive and visual sign for the ability and prestige of the city and an urban community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to survey the field of historical studies concerned with "middle" cities (populations 100,000 to one million) in the post-Independence period of South Asia-which includes the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives-with particular focus on places with populations between 100,000 and 200,000 and places that are rapidly growing to enter this category. The discussion begins with a statistical overview of the explosive growth of urbanization in South Asia since 1947-1948. The argument then moves into the colonial past to sketch the preconditions for urban change at the beginning of the British colonial period and the British-led contributions to "secondary" urban growth through initiatives in transportation systems, the cantonment, the hill station, and the agrarian marketing-and-administrative center. The argument then shifts back to approaches that may aid in the understanding of post-colonial economic and technological processes that built on the colonial framework to propel urban growth for middle cities; case studies here include central place theory, analysis of grass-roots capitalist development and entrepreneurship, and the impact of state-designed industrial planning. The article concludes with observations on the challenges presented to the historical profession by this gigantic field of urban expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]