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)
De Tocqueville also penned the famous metaphor of the 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