Walkman TPS-L2 can often attract bids of around five hundred euros on online auction sites, though we can ask ourselves what for. In the same way, the atmospheric and aesthetic ambience of the industrial crisis has never been so sought after in contemporary cultural production. Not only do films celebrate them but subcultures that developed within them are inspiring contemporary fashion and museum exhibitions, and music genres born in them are painstakingly being reproduced. Even the brutalist architecture is still very much present in the popular imaginary, and it is continuously adopted to convey many different meanings throughout popular culture.
The 2008-originated and ongoing economic crisis brought surprisingly real manufacturing into the forefront of economic and political discourse as means for stability and growth. For instance, in the 2012 French political elections, the need to save the national manufacturing industry came to the forefront of electoral campaigns, in relation to the closing down of an ArcelorMittal steel mill in the Florage area of northeast France (Leigh 2012). Suddenly, Europe seems to remember that the manufacturing sector is still a relevant element in its core economy. Although the service industry has made up for the losses in hard industry, the ongoing economic crisis puts the development of the last thirty years in perspective.
During its existence, the industrial city challenged city officials, architects, and planners in channelling the needs of an expanding but unstable capitalism into urban planning. Their efforts should have increasingly provided welfare and self-realisation to the citizens, as workers and as consumers. Nonetheless, the industrial city was also realised in strikingly similar ways in noncapitalist societies, like the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and more or less with the same aims.
Definitions
The industrial city might simply be defined as a city shaped by the highly organised material interaction of capital and labour in manufacturing. This definition is kept so general to include as many centres as possible. There are in fact different kinds of industrial cities: classic ones from the first Industrial Revolution, one-company towns, utopian towns planned via social engineering or philanthropy, highly specialised centres, industrial agglomerations, and even port towns. It is in the nineteenth century, thanks to the so-called first Industrial Revolution, that this urban type expanded throughout England and then on a global scale (Allen 2009).
This huge technological change in manufacturing production became a ‘revolution’ because of its enormous impact on society, labour, the organisation of local and global economies, and our understanding of time, space and belonging. This is why history and social sciences research focused for a long time on the relation between modernisation and industrialisation.
In urban historical research, there has been a tendency to work on individual industrial cities, with the examples of Manchester and Sheffield, in the European context, and of Detroit and Chicago, in the American context, towering over the rest. Contemporary historical research has begun filling the gaps by referring to industrial cities in global comparative perspective, by extending their stories beyond deindustrialisation, and by focusing on policies of various kinds, ranging from planning to environmental perspectives, from heritage making to cultural representations (Zimmermann 2013). However, the emphasis is very much on contrasting previous narratives of doom to underline positive ongoing developments, ranging from urban recovery to redevelopment, from renewal to tourist appeal. There is also a relevant classic corpus of research focusing on sociological traits (Badham 1986; Drucker 2007); however, the pure spatial dimension of the ‘industrial’ is sometimes overseen.
The formation of industrial cities is interpreted often as a consequence of a wider process investing technology, economy, work, leisure, culture, human relations, and power. The ‘urban’ as scale of analysis and as agency in the industrialisation and modernisation process seems to be taken into account only later, in reference to the emergence of the so-called post-industrial cities. In this literature, industrial cities are considered a historically defined type of the urbanisation process under industrialisation. The active role of manufacturing in the history of planning is sometimes overseen in favour of other spatial aspects, such as sprawl, suburbanisation, and segregation. In addition, cultural manifestations of the industrial cities are often seen either as simple/naive expressions of the working class or as intellectual, external, and stereotypical representations. ‘Post-industrial cities’ is an inclusive and
all-encompassing urban type, adaptable for all kinds of cities in the globalised world, as if the ‘post-’ prefix completely erased the real and material meaning of the adjective ‘industrial’. It seems apparent that the shift from ‘industrial’ to ‘post-industrial’ radically changed the way we understand the economic, cultural, and spatial functions of cities, and that deindustrialisation not only changed an economic paradigm but originated a brand new way to think about urbanisation in general.
The industrial city rose in connection to the first industrial revolution: economic capital and manufacture production clustered and rationalised in dense areas, close to energy sources such as coal and in proximity to navigable water or railways. This happened sometimes in small market centres, which suddenly rose in population and radically changed their economic function, first at the regional, then at the national, and finally at the global level. This began in the late decades of the eighteenth century, in towns in the North of England such as Manchester and Sheffield (Clark 2009, 133); these centres were, in the beginning, dependent on surrounding rural villages and areas, and only later, thanks to big technological changes and an inflow of capital, did they transform themselves into self-sufficient cities (Hall 1975, 21–30). As such, industrial cities relied on the subdivision of manufacturing, involving also the nonskilled labour of women and children. In 1782, the first large purpose-built cotton-spinning factory using steam power was opened in Manchester (Clark 2009, 149); however, it took several decades before this technology took over similar areas in continental Europe.
The North of England radically transformed into an industrial landscape across the nineteenth century, and similar developments took place on the continent in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. A network of big industrial conurbation, middle-sized specialised towns, port cities and administration centres began developing in the United Kingdom, thanks to political stability and the global imperial market of the Commonwealth. Engels ([1845] 1969) was deeply impressed during his long stay in Manchester, and his The Condition of the Working Class in England is still considered a valid analysis of spatial segregation and of the submission of urban design to the interests of nascent industrial capitalism. In addition, young Engels understood that in industrial cities, population accumulates, just like capital itself does, and this explains their exceptional growth (Engels 1969, 42). What capitalism needed in early industrial cities was density of population in walking proximity to factories, so that the journey to and from them wouldn’t be too long. Engels revealed the immense inequality that made industrial cities possible, and the way this inequality was material and spatial:
The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle-class. (Engels 1969, 57)
De Tocqueville ([1835] 1958), in his travel chronicles around England and Ireland, also reported on cities of the North (Manchester, Birmingham) as ruled by industrial production. For instance, on July 2, 1835, he notes:
The pressures which drive men from the fields into factories seem never to have been so active as now. Commerce flourishes and agriculture is in trouble. We hear in Manchester that crowds of country folk are beginning to arrive there. Wages, low though they seem, are nevertheless an improvement on what they have been getting. (De Tocqueville 1958, 176)
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