ABSTRACT
The overcrowding of London and Brussels, the capitals of the first two industrialized nations, deeply troubled nineteenth-century urban reformers. In the capitals of their industrializing societies, both undergirded by a strong foundation of laissez-faire principles, the Belgians watched the British who in turn observed the Belgians as they pioneered strategies of government intervention to domesticate the labour force in their capitals. Even as the European Commission issues White Papers on Sustainable Transport, adopts Green papers on the New Culture for Urban Mobility and confers on the topics of homelessness and housing rights, twenty-first-century scholars overlook the interlocking agendas of the nineteenth-century reformers who set masses of commuters into motion. Reformers in both London and Brussels pioneered national legislation and municipal construction to transport. The study of urban reform in London and Brussels before the First World War seemed an ideal fit for Marc Bloch's model 'two neighboring, contemporaneous societies', that 'continually influenced each other'.
