Order 807955: The City As A Metaphor
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TheIndustrialCityOutline.pptxThe Industrial City
Industrial City Form
The Newspaper as a Metaphor for the Processes of the Industrial City
Mass produced format that was widely available and affordable in order to make information industrialized
Available to be read by the masses
Newspaper
Complexity/organization
Distance (transcends distance)
Literacy
Visual
Mass audience
Accommodates different perspectives
It is a container, there is a lot of density
Produced/consumed, and is done very quickly
Non-linear medium, things unfold sporadically, you do not have to read things from beginning to end, you don’t need to wait for the beginning, you can start wherever you want while reading a newspaper
Diversity, equalizer
Anonymity
Portable, movement
Individual, every individual can get their own
Big headlines are meant to translate space into time
Telescoping effect
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Georg Simmel
“Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)
What is “the adaptation made by the personality in its adjustments to the forces that lie outside of it”?
What happens to your brain how do you adapt?
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The “Forces” of Small Town Life
Slower, habitual action
Emotional, long term relationships
Traditional customs
Familiar situations / people
We assume that the city places premium on speed and getting to places quickly
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The “Forces” of City Life
“The swift, continuous shift of external and internal stimuli”
Distant, utilitarian relationships
Diversity of customs
Brief, constant contact with others
“If the unceasing external contact of numbers of persons in the city should be met by the same number of inner reactions in small towns, in which one knows persons, …one would be atomized internally.”
The Metropolitan Type
Creates a “protective personality” against external milieu
Cannot react emotionally so reacts rationally
Develops a matter-of-fact “blasé” attitude
“the world is transformed into an arithmetical problem”
Blasé – can’t get excited
This is the urban personality, the lack of excitement towards things
You’ve been exposed to so much stimuli that you have a protective “blasé” boundary
A New Yorker is an example of this, they’ll see someone walking an elephant on the street and they’ll say “meh”
Money is a social process of impersonalization and has a leveling effect, raises the distinction between things
The city requires you to have a mental barrier
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Metropolitan Organization
A “firmly fixed framework which transcends all subjective elements”
e.g. need for punctuality (time)
e.g. need for coordination (space)
Using time as an equalizer
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“Punctuality, calculability and exactness … are required by the complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life … [and] colour the content of life”
The Urban Dynamic: The Crowd
Individual = both freedom and loneliness
must develop eccentricities to appear distinctive
The Social dynamic of space doesn’t depend on individual personalities
In a crowd, an individual is the most free but also the most lonely
In order to be recognizable or distinct, you need to work on it. You need to exaggerate your differences
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Lewis Mumford
“Factory, Railroad and Slum”
The Urban Ideal: “continuous social interaction raises to a higher level the complex activities of [people]”
The Industrial Urban Reality:
Life subordinated to capitalist growth:
Art and religion: “embellishments”
Sustenance of needs: “afterthoughts”
A lot of our ‘social heritage’ is collected and contained in city’s
City’s can be transformers, you take ordinary relationships and put them on another level
Gives you a chance to be specialized, be an individual, give shape to your individuality or “give form to life”, express your individuality
Failed to provide some needs, art and religion were looked at as embellishments
People were physically, emotionally, and culturally neglected
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Industrial Change
Work Life:
Healthy outdoor work → indoor drudgery
Substandard work conditions
Machine dominated work
Work life became factory based
Used children as labourers
Worked at a speed that was machine based
Machine dominated work
Tool vs. Machine
Tools are an extension of the human body, machines replace the movements of the body
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Home Life:
Split of work / home
Built for factory influx
Substandard conditions
Toxic environment
Close connection between domestic and industrial life has been split
Work life did not have a happy rhythm
Now you can work on shift work and before you worked in natural light while the sun was up
Putting a different toll on the body
These factories were put among environments that were being polluted and were exposed to them on a daily level
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Social Relations:
Worker-owner division
Lack of public facilities
Shift from common life to private circumstances
Lack of public facilities
Lack of public institutions that the roman and medieval city had
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The Industrialization of the City
When the British inventor Richard Arkwright patented his spinning frame in 1769, he created the first true factory in England. This act was to change Great Britain. Before long, this factory employed over 300 people. Nothing had ever been seen like this before. The domestic system only needed two to three people working in their own home. By 1789, his mill employed 800 people. With the exception of a few engineers in the factory, the bulk of the work force were essentially unskilled. They had their own job to do over a set number of hours. Whereas those in the domestic system could work their own hours and enjoyed a degree of flexibility, those in the factories were governed by a clock and factory rules.
Some factory owners were better than others when it came to looking after their work force. Arkwright had some harsh factory rules (such as workers being fined for whistling at work or looking out of the window) but he also built homes for his work force, and expected his child workers to receive a basic amount of education. Other owners were not as charitable as they believed that the workers at their factories should be grateful for having a job.
When the Industrial Revolution was at its height, very few laws had been passed by Parliament to protect the workers.
"We went to the mill at five in the morning. We worked until dinner time and then to nine or ten at night; on Saturday it could be till eleven and often till twelve at night. We were sent to clean the machinery on the Sunday."
-- Man interviewed in 1849 who had worked in a mill as a child.
Children as young as six years old during the industrial revolution worked hard hours for little or no pay. Children sometimes worked up to 19 hours a day, with a one-hour total break. Not until the Factory Act of 1833 did things improve. The Industrial Revolution witnessed a huge growth in the size of British cities. -- In 1695, the population of Britain was estimated to be 5.5 million. -- By 1801, it was 9.3 million -- By 1841, 15.9 million. This was a 60% growth rate in just 40 years.
Manchester, as an example, experienced a six-fold increase in its population between 1771 and 1831. Bradford grew by 50% every ten years between 1811 and 1851 and by 1851 only 50% of the population of Bradford was actually born there. As enclosure and technical developments in farming had reduced the need for people to work on farmland, many people moved to the cities to get accommodation and a job. These cities were not prepared for such an influx in such a short period of time.
These cities needed cheap homes as the Industrial Revolution continued to grow. There were few building regulations. Builders had a freehand to build as they wished. Profit became the main motivator for builders. They knew that those coming to the cities needed a job and somewhere to live. Therefore, a house was put up quickly and cheaply – and as many were built as was possible. The Industrial Revolution saw the start of what were known as tenement housing. These had no garden and the only part of the building not connected to another house would be the front (and only) entrance.
The Construction of Tenement Housing
None of these homes had a bathroom, toilet or running water. You either washed in a tin bath with the water collected from a local pump or you didn’t wash.
There was a courtyard between each row of terraces. Waste of all sorts from the homes was thrown into the courtyard and “night-men” would collect this at night and dispose of it. Sanitation and hygiene barely existed and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Toilets were basic cesspits. When these were filled they had to be emptied and what was collected was loaded onto a cart before being dumped in a local river. This work was also done by the night-men. Local laws stated that their work had to be done at night as the stench was too great to be tolerated during the day.
Drainage systems would have changed all of this but they cost money. Drainage pipes had to be made out of brick. One foot of brick drainage pipe cost 11 shillings. The poor could not pay this type of money and the wealthier members of a city were not willing to pay for such an expensive item if it did not benefit them. Liverpool had a drainage system built but only in the areas where the rich merchants and businessmen lived. None existed in the areas where the poor lived. By 1830, 50% of Manchester had no drainage system.
The streets where the poor lived were poorly kept. A doctor in Manchester wrote about the city: "Whole streets, unpaved and without drains or main sewers, are worn into deep ruts and holes in which water constantly stagnates, and are so covered with refuse and excrement as to be impassable from depth of mud and intolerable stench.“ Fresh water supplies were also very difficult to get in the poor areas. With no running water supplies, the best people could hope for was to leave a bucket out and collect rainwater. Some areas were lucky enough to have access to a well with a pump but there was always the chance that the well water could have been contaminated with sewage from a leaking cesspit. Those who lived near a river could use river water. However, this is where night-men emptied their carts full of sewage and where general rubbish was dumped. Any water collected would have been diluted sewage.
Why was so little done to improve towns and cities in Britain’s industrial zones? The mills, factories and mines etc. were owned by wealthy men who were also highly influential. Magistrates, who could ensure laws were carried out, rarely did if only the poor were affected. Those with money lived well away from the areas the poor lived in. Any money spent on improving the workers living areas would have been seen as lost profit.
Frederick Engels
The Conditions of the
Working Class in England (1845)
Industrialization and Mass Urbanization
1750-1850s:
Changes in technology (agriculture, textiles, steel)
Changes in transportation (railway, roads)
Rapid migration of workers to the city
Housing crisis and lack of urban infrastructure
“Magnet”
Pulling things into the industrialized city
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Influence of Industrialization on the City
Size
Shape
Residential and Work Settlement
Patterns of interaction
Housing in a form of charts, row of housing would not have access to light, air, space
Patterns of interaction – see each other as dots on a page, pixels in an atom, faces in a crowd, tend to have a social war against each other
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Manchester: City of Capitalism
“The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small statue by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks from which all drains and refuse find their way.. At the bank, each house is packed close behind its neighbour, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window frames… Such is the Old Town of Manchester…my description is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin and uninhabitableness… Everything that arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.”
Social Relations in the Industrial City
Individual Relations:
“brutal indifference”
Group Relations:
“war of each against all” (Hobbes)
social system of capitalism
capital: “the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production”
powerful few shape all at expense of others
Individual relations – capital relationships
Structure (the system) builds this idea that we are COMPETING for scarce resources
The person who owns the factory has the means of production
We become time workers, all you can sell is your time
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The City Shaped by Capitalism
Class Segregation:
Make poverty spatially invisible
Upper class: gardens, villas, clean air/ water
Working class: grime and filth
Lack of Class Consciousness:
Personal troubles made individual
Structure keeps worker trapped: no space for change
Social geography
Class becomes invisible
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