Industrial Metropolis Research Articles

The Second Coming of Global Shanghai

With the People's Republic of China gaining full membership in the World Trade Organization and much of the ensuing new investment likely to center in Shanghai, 2002 promised from the start to be a pivotal year for this most celebrated and infamous of Chinese port cities. Several things added to the heady sense of expectation that took hold a year ago by the banks of the muddy Huangpu River, perhaps the most important of which was the highly publicized bid local officials were gearing up to make to host the 2010 World Exposition. In an earlier era, bringing a world s fair to town could solidify a city's reputation as a global hub (think New York 1939) or put emergent world cities on the international map (think Chicago 1893). Shanghai's leaders began 2002 hoping that a successful bid would accomplish the latter for their metropolis as it strives to regain the reputation that it had in the 1930s (but lost between the 1940s and 1980s), not just as Chinas main industrial metropolis but as one of the world's great global cities. And at the close of last year, there was jubilation when word broke that the second world exposition of the twenty-first century would indeed be held beside the Huangpu. Two thousand and two was destined

Markets in the Meadows: Department Stores and Shopping Centers in the Decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920–1980

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

Markets in the Meadows: Department Stores and Shopping Centers in the Decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920–1980

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

The New `Peculiar Institution':

Not one but several `peculiar institutions' have operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States: chattel slavery from the colonial era to the Civil War; the Jim Crow system in the agrarian South from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution; the ghetto in the northern industrial metropolis; and, in the post-Keynesian age of desocialized wage labor and welfare retrenchment, the novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has become joined by a relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy. In the 1970s, as the urban `Black Belt' lost its economic role of labor extraction and proved unable to ensure ethnoracial closure, the prison was called upon to shore up caste division and help contain a dishonored and supernumerary population viewed as both deviant and dangerous. Beyond the specifics of the US case, this article suggests that much is to be learned from the comparison between ghetto and prison as kindred institutions of forced confinement entrusted with enclosing a stigmatized category so as to neutralize the material and/or symbolic threat it poses for the surrounding society.

The Urban Crisis as History (review)

The Urban Crisis As History Kenneth L. Kusmer (bio) Thomas J. Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xviii + 375 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, and index. $40.00. Howard Gillette, Jr. Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xiii + 297 pp. Illustrations, preface, note on sources, notes, and index. $32.95. In recent years, both popular and scholarly understanding of urban racial conditions have been dominated by the “underclass” thesis of sociologist William Julius Wilson. Relying heavily upon statistical data on employment, crime, and family composition, Wilson argued that the black, inner city poor have become increasingly isolated from white society and middle-class blacks since the 1960s, a trend he found to be more the result of suburbanization, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and other structural factors than the consequence of continuing racial discrimination. While acknowledging the problems of racism and segregation in the North prior to 1960, Wilson nevertheless contrasted the 1945–1960 period favorably with the deteriorating circumstances of the black poor in more recent decades. 1 Thomas J. Sugrue brings a much needed historical perspective to the underclass thesis, demonstrating conclusively that many of the problems of racial and class division that mar today’s postindustrial city existed much earlier, and were far more complex, than Wilson’s rather abstract account contends. That alone would make this volume invaluable. But it does much more. Superbly researched and engagingly written, The Origins of the Urban Crisis provides the first significant model that surveys the evolution of the troubled postwar American industrial metropolis by studying it largely from the bottom up. The main axes around which Sugrue fashions his history are housing and economics. In both cases, he is one of a growing number of scholars who sees the 1940s as a formative period in social and economic history. During World War II, both African Americans and white Appalachian migrants flooded into [End Page 667] the Motor City to meet the sudden demand for industrial labor generated by the war effort. The conflict over housing that developed as a consequence, however, did not affect whites and blacks equally. Only with great difficulty did black Detroiters escape the ironically named Paradise Valley ghetto, and when they did so they often had to surmount numerous obstacles and fierce white resistance. Blatantly biased real estate companies, exclusionary racial covenants, and the discriminatory policies of banks and the Federal Housing Administration were major roadblocks to equal access to housing. If these failed, white homeowners in neighborhoods adjacent to ghetto areas established “neighborhood associations.” Allied with real estate dealers and sympathetic white politicians, these groups used legal maneuvers, pressure tactics and, sometimes, violence to prevent integration. Beginning during World War II, whites also staunchly opposed the construction of integrated public housing in previously all-white neighborhoods, and a conservative mayor, Albert Cobo, responded by vetoing most public housing projects. Urban redevelopment and highway construction often forced the eviction of poor black tenants from their dilapidated dwellings, but little effort was made to relocate them. As a consequence of these policies, black residential areas expanded slowly; crowded, inadequate shelter remained the norm for most black Detroiters throughout the postwar era. Sugrue’s discussion of race and housing builds upon the earlier, path-breaking works of Kenneth Jackson, Ronald Bayor, Arnold Hirsch, and others. 2 What makes his case study distinctive is his placement of housing in the broad context of economic change. Detroit in the 1950s, Sugrue demonstrates, was already beginning to undergo the process of economic decline and deindustrialization often mistakenly associated exclusively with the post-1970 period. Detroit lost 134,000 jobs between 1947 and 1963 as a result of automation and the movement of auto production to new plants in the suburbs or small cities outside the state. But while many workers felt the impact of economic change, “[p]ersistent racial discrimination magnified the effects of deindustrialization on blacks” (p. 144). Until the early 1950s, blacks made rapid gains in auto employment, but mostly at the unskilled or semi-skilled level. In smaller or...

The Iron Lotus: Los Angeles and Postmodern Urbanism

In this article, we examine the landscapes of Los Angeles for evidence of a postmodern urbanism. We begin by contrasting the principles of the Chicago school's modernist industrial metropolis with the putatively postmodern Los Angeles school. We then examine the range of contemporary Southern California urbanisms and interpret this evidence as defining the problematic of a distinctively postmodern urbanism embedded within an emergent global capitalism.

Saudades Do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir

Claude Levi-Strauss, internationally known as brilliant and sometimes controversial anthropologist, is also skilled and sensitive photographer. Saudades do Brasil - nostalgia for Brazil, from title of musical composition by Darius Milhaud - presents 180 of more than 3000 photographs Levi-Strauss took in Brazil between 1935 and 1939. While serving as professor of sociology at University of Sao Paulo, young ethnographer made expeditions among natives of Mato Grosso and Southern Amazonia that resulted in numerous publications, most notably Tristes Tropiques. Most of these photographs are published here for first time. Levi-Strauss begins his photographic memoir in Sao Paulo, then frontier city rapidly changing to an industrial metropolis, city with a singular beauty, due to breaks in rhythm, architectural paradoxes, contrasting shapes and colors. The rest of photographs chronicle Levi-Strauss's expeditions among Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and other tribes - the last escapees from cataclysm that discovery and subsequent invasions had been for their ancestors. His pictures capture Amazonian landscape, people, and their activities, social lives, and ceremonies. Informative captions by Levi-Strauss enhance ethnographic and human interest of his photographs. Saudades do Brasil will be of interest to anthropologists, photographers, and readers concerned with part of world that is geographically remote but globally significant.

Toronto's girl problem: the perils and pleasures of the city, 1880-1930

With the turn of the century came increased industrialization and urbanization, and in Toronto one of the most visible results of this modernization was the influx of young, single women to the city. They came seeking work, independence, and excitement, but they were not to realize these goals without contention. Carolyn Strange examines the rise of the Toronto 'working girl,' the various agencies that 'discovered' her, the nature of 'the girl problem' from the point of view of moral overseers, the various strategies devised to solve this 'problem,' and lastly, the young women's responses to moral regulation. The 'working girl' seemed a problem to reformers, evangelists, social investigators, police, the courts, and journalists - men, mostly, who saw women's debasement as certain and appointed themselves as protectors of morality. They portrayed single women as victims of potential economic and sexual exploitation and urban immorality. Such characterization drew attention away from the greater problems these women faced: poverty, unemployment, poor housing and nutrition, and low wages. In the course of her investigation, Strange suggests fresh approaches to working-class and urban history. Her sources include the census, court papers, newspaper accounts, philanthropic society reports, and royal commissions, but Strange also employs less conventional sources, such as photographs and popular songs. She approaches the topic from a feminist viewpoint that is equally sensitive to the class and racial dimensions of the 'girl problem,' and compares her findings with the emergence of the working woman in contemporary United States and Great Britain. The overriding observation is that Torontonians projected their fears and hopes about urban industrialization onto the figure of the working girl. Young women were regulated from factories and offices, to streetcars and dancehalls, in an effort to control the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism. By the First World War however, their value as contributors to the expanding economy began to outweigh fear of their moral endangerment. As Torontonians grew accustomed to life in the industrial metropolis, the 'working girl' came to be seen as a valuable resource.

METAL CONTENT AND COMMUNITY STRUCTURE OF CRYPTOGAM BIOINDICATORS IN RELATION TO VEHICULAR TRAFFIC IN MONTSENY BIOSPHERE RESERVE (CATALONIA, SPAIN)

The health, abundance, metal content and species richness of corticolous macrolichens and bryophytes of Quercus ilexwere compared at nine roadside stations in Montseny Biosphere Reserve, 40 km NNE of Barcelona, and at a control site outside the industrial metropolis. Stations were characterized by traffic levels and the correlated parameter airborne particles. Corticolous flora at all stations was dominated by sorediate Parmeliaspecies ( P. caperata, P. soredians, P. subrudecta, P. subaurifera, P. sulcataand P. perlata). Damage, mainly due to arthropod feeding and fungal parasites, ranged from 14 to 33% of mean cover per station in the park and was 10% at the control site. Elevated levels of Pb, Zn and Cu were found in large thalli near the roadsides.

Metal Content and Community Structure of Cryptogam Bioindicators in relation to Vehicular Traffic in Montseny Biosphere Reserve (Catalonia, Spain)

The health, abundance, metal content and species richness of corticolous macrolichens and bryophytes of Quercus ilex were compared at nine roadside stations in Montseny Biosphere Reserve, 40 km NNE of Barcelona, and at a control site outside the industrial metropolis. Stations were characterized by traffic levels and the correlated parameter airborne particles. Corticolous flora at all stations was dominated by sorediate Parmelia species (P. caperata, P. soredians, P. subrudecta, P. subaurifera, P. sulcata and P. perlata). Damage, mainly due to arthropod feeding and fungal parasites, ranged from 14 to 33% of mean cover per station in the park and was 10% at the control site. Elevated levels of Pb, Zn and Cu were found in large thalli near the roadsides.

The city: heaven-on-earth or the hell-to-come?

Polis is the Greek for city; and, like so many things in our civilization, the never-ending debate about the ideal human environment began with the Greeks. To think about the ideal city, as Plato knew, is to think about the desirable, about the not-yet-achieved, about the future. There has been no end to the building of cities—from the Athens of Pericles to the Chandigarh of Le Corbusier. As I.F. Clarke shows, there is no end to the fiction of future cities for the reason that the applied sciences come like the Greeks bearing gifts; and these gifts can so affect the condition of human existence that the citizens have to plan their cities to meet growing populations, new means of communication, and ever-rising expectations. Before 1914 heaven was the organized, industrial metropolis. Since then the city of the future has moved through a history of hell-on-earth, first displayed in the dazzling images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), to the most recent space cities of the galactic age.

The Rise of the Industrial Metropolis: The Myth and the Reality

The Rise of the Industrial Metropolis: The Myth and the Reality

Xian

PR China is a socialist, developing country, currently undergoing extensive urban, economic and political reform. The Chinese government is pursuing a policy of planned urban growth and modernization, and since Xian is one of the largest cities in the country, its growth is being strictly controlled. Xian is well known for its association with traditional Chinese culture, and has an interesting history: once a powerful centre for political authority, it suffered a decline in importance until 1949, and is now a regional industrial metropolis. This article examines its housing policy and programmes and urban population growth in the light of this history, and the influence of national politics (including the extensive reforms and the more recent opendoor policy).

Atmospheric pollution studies at Kanpur—suspended particulate matter

Kanpur is the largest industrial metropolis in the State of Uttar Pradesh, India. The atmosphere over the city is considerably polluted. An air quality evaluation study during 1973–1975 has yielded interesting results. This communication deals specifically with suspended particulate matter and its constituents collected from three sampling stations: Gwaltoli, Beconganj and Raipurwa. The study revealed that the 3-y average of the annual arithmetic means recorded for the three stations were 224, 256 and 298 μg m −3, respectively. The constituents of the suspended particulate matter evaluated are benzene extractable matter, heavy metals namely iron, lead, copper, zinc and chromium and acid radicals namely sulphate and nitrate. Interesting observations have been recorded on the relationship of suspended particulate matter and benzene extractable matter.

Residential segregation in the American metropolis: concentration, dispersion and dominance

Measuring residential segregation is a challenging and crucial task. Many important questions in urban history can be understood fully only after correctly assessing the importance and significance of the clustering patterns of different groups of urbanites. However, the extent to which and the ways in which various social classes, races, and ethnic groups congregated in the expanding industrial metropolis of nineteenth-century America form the subject of heated debates among historians. With large black ghettos now existing in all major cities, experts and lay citizens alike agree that Americans live in a ‘separated society’. In the first half of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas took the form of ghettoized central cities with white suburbs. With the transfer of many urban functions to suburban units, and the shift of America from a nation of urbanites to a nation of suburbanites, a complex pattern of suburban segregation also developed. The universal concern about the magnitude of today's segregation makes the historical debate intriguing. Was it once different? Was there a time when cities were integrated? At some time in the past, many believe, American cities were better places in which to live—hence we should strive to recover our lost community.

The Emergence of Industrial Districts in Mid-Nineteenth Century Baltimore

A MARKED transition in form and function accompanied the rapid population growth in several North American cities during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although commerce continued to dominate the urban economy, new types and organizational forms of manufacturing increasingly assumed important roles.1 Such developments generally altered or even displaced some traditional crafts in the manufacturing and occupational structures.2 At the same time, unprecedented numbers of German and Irish immigrants arrived in the cities. Despite innovations in intracity transportation, the alterations in scale, function, and population composition occurred without commensurate changes in the mode of urban movement, and the big cities remained essentially pedestrian at mid century.3 This combination of events resulted in urban areas with a geography that was transitional between the early mercantile city and the later turn-of-the-century industrial metropolis.4 In characteristics such as population size and composition, emergence of large-scale and producer-goods' manufacturing, and embryonic phases of commuting, the mid-century city displayed industrial form. In characteristics such as dominance of commerce and pedestrian movement, persistence of some craft activities, and general heterogeneity of land use, the American city was still mercantile. The geography of the mid-century transitional city is not clearly understood. Conventional descriptions of a congested, heterogeneous urban landscape frequently rest on impressionistic surveys of contemporary data and confusing, often imprecise, sketches of change. Indeed, interpretations of the transformation of the mercantile city into the industrial metropolis understate the patterns and processes of the transition that, by encompassing decades of change, comprises a period of urban experience capable of influencing the subsequent industrial one.5 The early industrialization of some sectors of production, by involving large numbers of people and sizeable parcels of land, contributed to the evolution of a mid-nineteenth-century urban structure. In this paper, the location of all industrial activities in 1860 for the

The Civic Involvement of Bankers: An Analysis of the Influence of Economic Power and Social Prominence in the Command of Civic Policy Positions

This paper examines distribution of positions of authority in important civic policy organizations among a broad range of leaders who are directors of commercial banks in a major metropolitan area. The civic organizations studied work in three different substantive areas: social welfare and social service; culture and education; and formulation and communication of policy. The bankers are distinguished in terms of two dimensions of centrality within class: their closeness to centers of economic power, as defined by corporate and bank interlocking directorates, and their upper class social prominence, as defined by membership in most exclusive local clubs and related social organizations. The research reveals a pattern of concentration in command of civic policy positions at metropolitan level and indicates that of leading capitalists is best defined in terms of networks of both economic and upper class prominence. This concentration of within a core group of capitalists is discussed in relation to struggle for social hegemony in a declining industrial metropolis. The most enduring questions in studies of social in American society have concerned roles played by groups in private sector. Though various terminologies and conceptual frameworks have been used to categorize these groups, including references to business elites, business capitalist and dominant or ruling primary focus in these studies has been on whether groups are able to dominate nonbusiness social institutions and processes of social in society in general to relative exclusion of other class groups. The most extensive consideration of these issues has emerged in literature on community structures (cf. Aiken and Mott, 1970; French, 1969; and Clark, 1975). The present study explores nature of social from a notably different, and often neglected, perspective. Rather than comparing influence of interests to that of other interests, we examine internal structure of class in order to determine which capitalists are in command of positions of social power. This research, based on study of a broad range of leaders who hold positions as directors of commercial banks within a major metropolitan area, concerns distribution of within class. The key question in this research is whether broader social exercised by capitalists is concentrated in a core group within class or whether that is dispersed in a more fragmented pattern. We shall examine extent to which those capitalists whose activities have spread into various commanding circles of institutions of power are drawn disproportionately from those most central to networks of and prominence within their class, that is from the inner circles of upper classes (Mills, 1956:69). In studying distribution of within class, our specific concern is with command of leading nongovernmental civic organizations operating at metropolitan level

A Stage in the Development of the Industrial Town: A Case Study of Cardiff, 1845-75

This study looks at the internal spatial reorganization of a town as it was transformed from a constrained pre-industrial kernel into a rapidly growing industrial metropolis. Starting from the premise that the intra-urban patterns of the Sjoberg and Burgess models represent extremes on a developmental continuum, an attempt is made to analyse the residential adaptations which occurred in the initial stages of change from the pre-industrial to the industrial pattern. The case study is the city of Cardiff, which showed phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century. This remarkable increase was related to the expansion of its port facilities, first for the iron industry, and then, and more importantly, for the coal export trade. The employment opportunities in dock and ancillary activities attracted a steady stream of migrants which could not be accommodated within the narrow confines of the existing medieval market town. Given this situation, what arrangement of residences emerged? The resultant distributions are examined using rateable values for 1846 and 1874-6, social data from the 1851 and 1871 Censuses, and contemporary health reports. The study shows that Cardiff was at a crossroads in terms of internal layout: it still retained some elements of its pre-industrial structure, but it was embarking on a process of suburban extension with a fringe of medium/low value artisan/working-class property. THE initial stimulus to this study was Schnore's observations on the evolution of the internal spatial structure of cities.' He attempted to characterize the changing ecological pattern of the city as it was transformed from a 'pre-industrial' to an 'industrial' or 'modern' state. This was achieved not by taking one city and monitoring its internal progress over time but by making a broad comparison between studies of many cities in North and South America, i.e. between cities in modern industrial and pre-industrial economies, and highlighting the main stages of an evolutionary sequence. To him 'the possibility that the traditional Latin American

Economic policy and population change in Thailand

This paper argues that in Thailand a link can be demonstrated between the recent fertility decline and an economic policy variable, the rice premium. The rice export tax introduced a check to profitability in rice agriculture, leading capital and also entrepreneurial talent out of agriculture into the urban industrial sector; keeping the structure of agriculture small-scale peasant holdings; and permitting labour costs to remain low in the urban industrial sector. Other government policies plus foreign investment and US aid led to rapid industrial growth, which coupled with consolidation of the transportation and communication systems triggered massive rural to urban migration. As Bangkok became a modern industrial metropolis, complete with urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and smog, the micro-economic cost—benefit equation turned against large families for many urban couples. Fertility fell rapidly in the urban areas, and this decline has spread into the countryside. The rice export tax thus has had profound demographic as well as economic effects.

European Labor Migration: Consequences for the Countries of Worker Origin

An attempt is made to critically reappraise the overall relationship between labor emigration and the economic, sociocultural, and political systems of the countries of worker origin along which emigration operates simultaneously as both a dependent and an independent variable. The emigration policy dilemmas facing sending countries have their roots in the international economic system's structural realities, as understood through the related paradigms of center/periphery and uneven development. The development gap between labor receivers and suppliers has under conditions of substantial and almost uninterrupted growth on the part of the receivers aggravated the advanced European industrial powers' structural labor shortages and exaggerated their need for large continents of foreign labor, thus literally premising their continuous growth on the constant supply of such labor. Yet, at the same time, the less developed countries (LDCs) in the European periphery were asked to play the role of industrial satellites to the industrial metropolis, a task which was most welcome in the developing countries' expansive mode of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This situation encouraged the creation of an atmosphere of negligence in the capitals of the sending countries which facilitated the gradual internationalization of labor. The reliance on foreign labor has failed to solve those serious structural economic deficiencies of labor receivers that it was purported to correct, and, in fact, may have aggravated them. Additionally, the automatic control mechanisms which has been relied upon to regulate the migrant inflow are proving very unreliable. Labor emigration has usually been posited as the vehicle for the effective mitigation of several acute structural economic problems of labor exporters, while the twin vehicles of remittances and return of trained workers offer the LDCs an opportunity to effect their own economic transformation. The expectation that returning emigrants will have acquired the occupational skills to effect the socioeconomic metamorphosis of their countries has been little more than a myth.