History
Following the Industrial Revolution, ribbon development became prevalent along railway lines: predominantly in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A good example of this was the deliberate promotion of Metroland along London's Metropolitan Railway. Similar evidence can be found from Long Island (where Frederick W Dunton bought much real estate to encourage New Yorkers to settle along the Long Island Railroad lines), Boston and across the American mid-west.
Such expansion of human settlement is now seen as positively helpful in the fight against environmental destruction caused by building along roads.
It can also occur along ridge lines, canals and coastlines, the latter especially occurring as people seeking seachange lifestyles build their houses where they can get the best view.
The resulting towns and cities are often difficult to service efficiently. Often, the first problems noticed by residents is traffic congestion as people compete to move along the narrow urban corridor while ever more people join the ribbon further along the corridor. Urban consolidation is often a solution to encourage growth towards a more compact urban form.
Ribbon development can also be compared with a linear village which is a village that grew along a transportation route, not as part of a city's expansion.
Read more about this topic: Ribbon Development
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—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
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