‘Municipalisation’, the transferral to city ownership of previously private, corporate assets, was a major component of Bismarck's social welfare state in urban settings, beginning in the 1870s. Such pivotal municipally owned resources as mass transportation, water systems, parks, utilities that provided gas and electricity, and housing were key components of municipalisation, which is also known as municipal socialism (Prisching, 1997).

Mary Simkhovitch (referred to as ‘Mary’ throughout the rest of this chapter) learned about municipalisation when attending lectures as a graduate student at the Free University of Berlin during academic year 1895/96 (Simkhovitch, 1938). Through daily exploration of the city over two semesters, Mary studied and admired municipalisation's widespread implementation in Berlin. Born in 1867 and raised as a Republican Yankee on a farm near Boston in Newton, Massachusetts, US, Mary shaped a career in early social work and city planning that extended for almost five decades (1897–1946). She soon became a nationally prominent social welfare leader recognised for generating innovative approaches to settlement house programming and outreach, sponsoring social science research and publication at the neighbourhood level, institutionalising the arts as a core settlement house legacy, and advocating and lobbying in municipal and national arenas. For example, as a key actor during President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Mary worked closely with Harry Hopkins to launch public house projects in multiple US cities as part of the Works Progress Administration and, from 1939 onwards, the Works Projects Administration (McDonnell, 1957; Hubbard, 2018).

One of a group of young native-born women and men who had grown to adulthood in a US dominated throughout the second half of the 19th century by leaders who adhered to an unapologetic version of laissez-faire politics and economics, Mary spent her first 28 years surrounded by formal and informal lessons about the necessity and cultural superiority of American political devotion to individualistic self-reliance. Nonetheless, during the Progressive Era in the US, Mary turned into an urban reformer who advocated steadily and forcefully throughout her long adult life for creating an expansive set of free municipal services and institutions in New York City that, she hoped, would one day resemble and equal those of Berlin.