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sustained by real estate businessmen and middle-class Chicagoans during the Progressive Era prefigured the large-scale, standardized, homogeneous suburbs located on city peripheries after 1920. However, during this earlier period, residents of improved residential neighborhoods rarely distinguished between the urban city and the suburban periphery in the manner of their post-1920 successors. Whereas earlier improvers treated their neighborhoods as special parts of the urban landscape, later suburbanites adopted a more explicit anti-urban stance that was accentuated by a new physical and social distance between suburbs and cities. This shift had many causes, though changes within the residential real estate industry were decisive.
An important adjunct to the new professionalism of real estate businessmen was their promotion of a land use theory founded upon the homogeneity, separation, and rigid regulation of land uses. Real estate businessmen helped systematize the notion that improved residential landscapes were financially and morally valuable only when securely insulated from antithetical uses, which they defined along class and, under certain circumstances, racial lines. Such a view was founded upon older, anti-urban traditions, and it profoundly challenged the reformist theory of social ethics affirming the mutuality of city dwellers and the spaces they inhabited. The improvement ideology proved useful in advancing the professional program of real estate businessmen, including their new land use theory. In particular, they utilized the ideology to legitimize a system of regulations and restrictions intended to safeguard the financial and moral value of improved residential neighborhoods by separating them from apparently incompatible land uses. This emphasis on exclusivity was subjected to increasing pressure by social changes in Chicago during the 1910s. The reactionary measures designed to counter the effects of social change were more and more decisive after 1910, and they were implemented through an increasingly formalized relationship between professional real estate businessmen and NIAs.
The rural origins of improvement and its adoption by real estate businessmen were decisive in shaping the ideology and its accompanying grassroots practices in an urban context. In Chicago, grassroots activities