The History and Future of Places: Part 5 – Industrialisation, urbanisation, roots of globalisation

The orderly practices of the Age of Reason trickled on into the early 19th century. However, their impetus had already started to wane before the end of the 18th century, as innovations in manufacturing heralded the onset of the Industrial Revolution. An entirely different, utilitarian approach to making places soon became prevalent. It would linger well into the 20th century.

The impact of this industrial shift outweighed all previous changes in placemaking. Indeed, it effectively made all previous places appear obsolete. In 1800, at the beginning of the industrial century, city streets and farms still had much in common with the places of previous ages. Buildings and building sites were prepared and assembled by hand. Most people still walked everywhere. Houses were lit with candles. The noises and smells were those of animals and people. A hundred years later, the dominant smells and noises were those of machines. Buildings were coated in coal dust. Hills were levelled with steam-shovels. People rode in streetcars or railways. Streets had electric lighting and were draped with telephone wires.

The industrial age changed places in ways that that were utterly unprecedented. A drawing from Augustus Pugin’s book Contrasts, published in 1835, contrasted “the noble edifices of the 14th and 15th centuries and similar buildings of the present day” – a skyline in which church spires had given way to factory chimneys.

In the background of these changes was a dramatic acceleration in the rate of population growth. The population in Europe doubled between 1800 and 1900 (numbers are not precisely known, but best estimates chart the growth from about 152 million to 296 million); the population of England, the heart of the Industrial Revolution, quadrupled from 7.8 million to 30 million. Even though industrialisation caused serious pollution and, for some, grinding poverty, the main reason for this growth was reduced mortality. Fewer children were dying and people in general were living longer – probably a result of their improved diets.

It helped that a large share of the growth was accommodated by emigration to the great spaces of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and, particularly, North America. The population of the United States grew from 5.3 million to 76.2 million between 1800 and 1900. At least 30 million of these were immigrants from rural regions with failing economies who had chosen to uproot themselves in pursuit of a better life. In the new world the result was placemaking that spread across continents. In the process, of course, indigenous populations were displaced; this was also a time of great place unmaking.

Population growth in both the old and new worlds was concentrated in towns and cities, where factories provided employment for unskilled workers. Despite the pollution and slums, pay conditions often afforded a better quality of life to urban workers than their rural counterparts. In the United States in 1800 only 6 percent of the population was urbanised; by 1900 it was 40 percent. In England in 1800 roughly 33 percent was urban; by 1900 it was 77 percent.

The rates of growth in individual towns and cities was dramatic. The population of Bolton, a centre of innovation in cotton manufacturing in England, grew from 12,500 to 168,000 over the course of the century. London grew from about 1 million to 5 million. Chicago grew from 5,000 in 1840 to 1.7 million in 1900. The character of urban places was remade.

Almost everything about these industrial cities was unprecedented. Factories with endlessly repetitive work done in shifts were themselves new types of workplaces: huge foundries and steam driven machines; iron bridges and steel framed skyscrapers. Tenements and row houses, more or less mass-produced to minimal standards, were new types of placeless living places. Railways provided the means of travelling at speeds hitherto inconceivable. And because factories and railways were voracious consumers of iron, coal and wood, the provision of these resources necessitated the creation of new types of places as well. Towns entirely devoted to a single purpose sprung up everywhere: mining communities coated in coal dust and surrounded by spoil tips, or factory towns choked by smoke. The rhythm of life was dictated by the demands of production and shift work.

Factories, not palaces or cathedrals, were the great new buildings of the industrial age. They were widely illustrated in engravings, the smoke streaming from their chimneys symbolic of progress and the power of steam. Less illustrated but scarcely less substantial were legislatures, parliament buildings and town halls, usually large and elaborate, and prominently situated in park-like spaces. They served as a demonstration that governments of liberal democracy, whether at municipal, regional or national level, were seats of power in the places where liberal democracy now prevailed – equal players in a capitalist world.

In spite of these symbols of progress, the cities of the Industrial Age were for the most part unpleasant, polluted, congested and uncomfortable places. This was especially so for the poor, but true also for the well-to-do. The smog, unpaved streets covered in horse manure, and epidemics of cholera and typhoid caused by unsanitary conditions did not respect class differences. The more affluent were able to escape the worst discomforts by locating themselves on relatively pleasant hilltop locations or moving to villas in suburban developments easily accessible by railways or streetcars. These were well-built in whatever revival style was fashionable at the time – Gothic, Italianate, Neo-Classical, Queen Anne – and many are still attractive residential districts.

Over the course of the 19th century there were several major innovations that improved in the quality of places for everyone. For instance, in 1858 very hot weather in London caused unbearably foul odours to rise from the Thames – an event known as the Great Stink. This led to improvements in urban sewerage systems (it probably helped that the Houses of Parliament were, and remain, next to the river). And as urban places grew, governments ensured that they included schools, hospitals, and public parks, along with urban filtration and water distribution systems. These improvements must have contributed to the continuing rapid population and urban growth.

Over the course of the 19th century, relationships between places underwent a radical change. Railways and the telegraph, and then electric streetcars and telephones, worked in concert to collapse time and space, through the high-speed movement of goods, people and messages. What had previously been remote was made quickly accessible – locally, regionally, nationally and globally. By the 1880s, suburbs were expanding rapidly along streetcar lines. Europe and India were laced with networks of railways while North America had been crossed by transcontinental railroads. Submarine cables had been laid across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, linking Europe, Australia and America.

A metamorphosis had occurred within the space of a single century; the identities of, and relationships between, places had changed. The technologies, people, products, architectural fashions and practices necessary for the making of places had been distributed around the world.