H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress on human life and thought London: Harper & Row, 1901.
In 1901 English science fiction writer H.G Wells speculated on the acclerated suburbanization and urban sprawl (drawing on London as a centrifugal city par excellence):
Many of the railway-begotten ‘giant cities’ will reach their maximum in the coming century [and] in all probability they … are designed to … dissection and diffusion … [T]hese coming cities will not be, in the old sense, cities at all; they will present a new and entirely different phase of human distribution. [T]he social history of the middle and latter third of the nineteenth century … [has been] the history of a gigantic rush of population into the magic radius of — for most people — four miles … But … [n]ew forces, at present so potently centripetal in their influence, bring with them the distinct promise of a centrifugal application … Great towns before this century presented rounded contours and grew as puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed …the mere first rough expedient of far more convenient rapid developments …We are … in the early phase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities … A city of pedestrians inexorably limited by a radius of four miles … a horse-using city may grow out to seven or eight … It is too much to expect that the available area for even the common daily toilers of the great city of year 2000 … will have a radius of over one hundred miles?… The country will take itself many of the qualities of the city. The old antithesis will…cease, the boundary lines will altogether disappear…