Building the Workingman's Paradise
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Building the Workingman's Paradise by Margaret Crawford
This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism-the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces.
In her brilliant exploration of company towns from 1790 to 1925, Margaret Crawford has created the definitive book on this major topic in American economic and urban history, as well as a model of fine analytical writing about the politics of designHer work reveals the potential of architectural history to illuminate the contested terrains of housing, urban design, and social life. -- Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and American Studies, Yale University.
Margaret Crawford is Professor and Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She edited The Car and the City: The Automobile, The Built Environment, and Daily Life.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780860916956 |
| ISBN 10 | 0860916952 |
| Title | Building the Workingman's Paradise |
| Author | Margaret Crawford |
| Series | Haymarket |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
| Year published | 1996-02-17 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |