While no process of change can be precisely dated, let us, for simplicity, "bound" this transformation within the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This is also the period we conventionally think of as the era of revolutions-industrial, technological, and urban (as well as political). And it seems hardly a coincidence that changes in the ordering of urban public space should coincide with other convulsive historical changes. Indeed, they seem each to be elements of a sweeping alteration in the human condition and, as such, interrelated and intertwined in a complex chain of mutual cause and effect.

SEED: Could be an essay angle: how physical infrastructure change reflects and drives larger societal upheavals — cities as material record of revolution.

XREF: Connects to broader historical arguments about modernization and the spatial transformation of cities across industrial-era studies.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 303