Industrial city
The industrial city is what the Industrial Revolution produced between 1800 and 1900: explosive growth around the factory, overcrowded working-class districts without water or sewers, epidemics, and the first planning legislation in history as a response. Manchester was its model and its warning.
Friedrich Engels described the condition of the working class in England in 1845 and unknowingly founded urban critique. Public health, the urban extension, the garden city and zoning are all attempts to correct the industrial city. Its present reverse is the deindustrialised city, factories turned into lofts.
Videos on this term (14)
- Infrastructure
Bent Flyvbjerg: Why Megaprojects Fail Despite a Rational Plan
Bent Flyvbjerg explains why megaprojects run over budget and time: power versus rationality in Aalborg, optimism…
Bent Flyvbjerg 3 min read - Urban economy
Guggenheim Versus the Rest: Myths and Realities of Iconic Museums
Why the Guggenheim effect worked in Bilbao and failed when copied: the prior plan, Beatriz Plaza's data, the…
3 min read - Urban history
Friedrich Engels and the Industrial City: The Origins of Urban Justice
Engels described in 1845 how Manchester hid its workers and in 1872 why housing cannot be solved by reform. His…
Friedrich Engels 3 min read - Urban history
Lewis Mumford: five thousand years of city in one book
From Mesopotamia to the industrial city, Mumford shows each era built the city it deserved, and judges the…
Lewis Mumford 2 min read - Urban history
Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow: A History of Urban Planning
Cities of Tomorrow (1988) by Peter Hall traces the twentieth century's planning ideas, from Howard to Le Corbusier,…
Peter Hall 2 min read - Urban psychology
Happy City by Charles Montgomery: Urban Design and Happiness
Happy City (2013) by Charles Montgomery gathers the evidence on which urban design makes us happier: shorter…
2 min read - Shrinking cities
Robert Beauregard: Urban Decline and Postindustrial Cities
Robert Beauregard explains in Voices of Decline how the decline of Detroit, Cleveland or St. Louis was at once fact…
Robert Beauregard 3 min read - Urban history
Chris Ealham and Barcelona's Class Struggle (1898-1937)
Chris Ealham reconstructs how industrial Barcelona produced anarcho-syndicalism and how strikes, riots and planning…
Chris Ealham 3 min read - Shrinking cities
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
Charlie LeDuff narrates in Detroit: An American Autopsy the collapse of the Motor City: relocation, white flight,…
3 min read - Urban economy
City of Quartz by Mike Davis: The Inequality That Made Los Angeles
City of Quartz (1990) by Mike Davis excavates the power that built Los Angeles: developers, homeowners, police and…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Urban Condition: The Fragmented Metropolis of Globalisation
The Urban Condition (1999) by the Ghent Urban Studies Team describes the dispersed metropolis of globalisation and…
3 min read - Housing
Loïc Wacquant: why the ghetto is not an accident
Wacquant compares American ghettos with French banlieues and shows that advanced marginality is not residual but…
2 min read - Shrinking cities
Postindustrial Cities: How They Reinvent Themselves and Who Wins
Postindustrial cities replaced factories with services, culture and technology. What David Harvey, John Friedmann…
2 min read - Urban economy
How Capitalism Shapes Cities: David M. Gordon and Harvey
How capitalism shapes cities according to urban political economy: David M. Gordon's three phases, Harvey's…
2 min read
