dirty sewer producing pure gold (De Tocqueville 1958, 175), a vivid image of the huge paradox embedded into early industrial cities, where labour exploitation and capital gain achieved their most dystopian interaction.
Both Engels and De Tocqueville, in fact, focus on the very early and unregulated industrial city, where child labour, long working hours, segregation, and bare exploitation of labour was rampant, and where urban planning and welfare were basically nonexistent (Hall 1975, 22–30).
This classic model was very adaptive; parallel to this, however, a new paradigm in industrial production and economic growth brought new industrial cities in existence.
Simon Gunn (2013) claims that industrial city history can be broadly framed around four periods. The years from 1800 to 1880 encompass the phase of the already named first Industrial Revolution, where the classic industrial cities were born in connection with coal and textiles. Gunn considers the industrial cities born around this period to have been the most versatile in terms of adaptation to technological, architectural, and engineering changes. The phase of the second Industrial Revolution, from 1880 to 1920, is based on the heavy steel and iron industries, the spread of Fordist methods of production, and the first wave of social reforms.
Gunn considers the third period, from 1930 to 1970, as the climax in the industrial city history, with the spread of specially defined industrial zones, mass housing programs, slum clearance, and highway systems with mass motorisation. The period from 1970 to 2010 is one of deindustrialisation, urban fragmentation, and entropy. It sees forces already at stake, both at the end of the nineteenth century and during the interwar period, taking over and affecting the city negatively in terms of loss of inhabitants, economic crisis, and reputation. This periodisation is interesting if we consider it not only in temporal terms but also spatially: the visual signs of these four time frames are layered and sometimes simultaneously present in form of architectures, mindscapes, reputations, discourses, and affect. They create a palimpsest (Bottà 2012) of material, atmospheric, and affective layers, which affects the way we can talk and make sense of the ‘industrial’. Moreover, the history of the industrial city in Europe is connected to nation building, labour union struggles, welfare implementation, immigration, technological optimism, and architectonic modernism. It also involves warfare, which has modified several times the geopolitical situation of the European continent and conditioned the development and horizons of supranational, national, and local economies. Last but not least, it also involves a continuous attempt to hide, tame, and sometimes solve the endemic environmental problems connected to the industrial activities, ranging from noise and smell pollution to toxic waste landfills. For instance, Sheffield: City on the Move (Coulthard and Coulthard 1972), a documentary about the northern English city, was commissioned by the city’s publicity officer and released in 1972. The film starts by introducing what seems a striking innovation: the factory smoke ban, which made the city centre ‘smokeless’ and clear (Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information 2005). Sheffield factories are said to be producing steel, which is ‘still at the heart of the city’s heavy industry’ and which is ‘built into our modern life in countless essential ways’ (Coulthard and Coulthard 1972). In the early 1970s, environmental innovations were still understood only in their function of facilitating city life without putting obstacles to the most important element—once again, production. Very clear both in the structure and in the content of the documentary is the self-evident centrality of the heavy industry as able to ‘forge’ all the other cultural, social, and architectural elements of Sheffield. Like many other cities and regions in Europe, Sheffield organised and understood itself as an industrial city; it was bound to a specific kind of heavy production, which influenced and determined all other aspects of city life, ranging from its social structure to its cultural offerings. In addition, being known as an ‘industrial city’ since the post-war era seemed to overcome its traditional dystopian image, thanks to the interplay among technology, innovation, and welfare. The dreams, aspirations, struggles, expectations, activities, Weltanschauung, and feelings of its citizens were strongly linked to this understanding.
Throughout its history, down to the contemporary global spread of industrial conurbations over the Global South, material production is the main paradigm for the economic growth and spatial development of the industrial city. Paradoxically, an industrial city produces material goods, whose consumption further ‘produces’ the city. Technological innovations facilitate production, and other functions are secondary. For instance, the first electric lights in Finland (and in the whole of Northern Europe, according to the plaque commemorating this) appeared in the Plevna weaving shed of the Finlayson company, located in the centre of Tampere, on March 15, 1882. This innovation allowed more efficient working hours even in the darkest months of the Finnish winter. Following on de Tocqueville’s metaphor, it is the flow of gold that maintains and develops the dirty sewer, allowing the gold to continue flowing. This paradox shapes daily and yearly rhythms, planning, transportation, education, and the implementation of policies. For instance, an industrial city relies on swift transportation both of goods and people to and from production areas. This was refined overtime and achieved its technological climax in the construction of complex motorways and in the rise of the car as nearly exclusive regime of mobility, which is still negatively affecting cities today. The industrial city also relies on the education and training of certain professional figures and on their continuous availability, secured especially by continuous immigration from rural areas and from developing countries. Still today, certain materials and architectural styles are typical of industrial cities: functionalism and bare concrete.
Central for industrial cities is the idea of continuous growth and expansion, which is, however, sometimes achieved by political decision-making, which takes place elsewhere, namely, in capital cities (see table 1.1 for a summary of this dichotomy). Across Europe, we can find several examples of a clear dichotomy, if not a tension, between industrial centres and capital cities. Apart from the four examples mentioned in this book, we find similar patterns in Holland, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam; in Sweden, between Stockholm and Goteborg; in France, between Paris and Marseille; and so on, depending often on the size of the country and its history. Rarely have capital cities around the world been pure industrial cities, despite sometimes having had a strong industrial character (like, e.g., Berlin, New York City, or London). This is mostly connected to the fact that power (in political terms) resides physically in capital cities, and industrial cities depend on it. From the point of view of mental maps (Gould and White 1974), capital cities are always central (even if not in strict geographical terms), while industrial cities are in vague peripheries. Cultural institutions that perpetuate knowledge, such as national museums, archives, and universities, are in capitals; while in industrial cities resides technology in terms of research centres and polytechnics. Capital cities also tend to have a stronger ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960) and individuality—a stronger brand, based on buzz, colours, and offerings—while industrial cities are bound to monotony and greyness and a more blurry focus. The idea of people immigrating from rural areas and finding quick enrolment into the working class also implies a clear imbalance in terms of social mix of the typical city population. Industrial city inhabitants are considered inferior in terms of manners, behaviours, free time activities, language, and cultural life. Rob Shields (1991, 207–45), for instance, identifies ‘the North’ in England as an imaginary industrial space on the margin, without a clear jurisdiction, under constant bad weather, and with a highly emotional population that is devoted to football and binge drinking. Shields deconstructs this myth by tracing its origins in intellectual and literary tropes built in the South of England that aim to reestablish via culture London’s privilege over the periphery of, for instance, Lancashire and the Midlands.
| Capital City | Industrial City |
| Power | Power-dependant |
| Centre | Periphery |
| Education, knowledge | Technology, innovation |
| Colours | Grey |
| Buzz | Depression |
| Wide offerings | Monotony, monofunctional |
| Culture | Without own culture |
| Sharp, individual | Atmospheric, suspended |
| Privileged inhabitants | Rough inhabitants |
Economic
