Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Urbanism, Architecture

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite my four-star review, I wouldn't recommend this to everyone. Crawford presents a history of the development of the US company town in a seemingly thorough manner with a so-so selection of photographic examples and smallish site plans. Certainly interesting to a degree – and I would say well written – this is, ultimately, about numerous small insta-towns in rural Massachusetts, sandy New Mexico, and so forth. Perhaps the most depressing thing about this history for us architecture types is the ultimate – and often prompt – failure of what often seemed like the ideal situation for Atterbury, Goodhue, et. al. Like many examples of mid-century “projects,” this offers more proof of the limited power of design and planning in the face of larger social and economic forces. Definitely a good read for those specifically interested in a particular and mostly neglected area of U.S. settlement history.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written book about so-called 'new' company towns in the first decades of the last century in the US. The difference with old-style company towns is that the new ones were designed deliberately with professional involvement of architects, landscape architects and designers. This makes them more outstanding than non-designed factory villages, mining and factory towns. The book is nicely illustrated.