Industrialization and the modern world

Before 1800, innovations in agricultural and manufacturing techniques had permitted a singular concentration of productive activity close to the sources of mechanical power—water and coal. A corresponding movement of population was accelerated by the perfection of the steam engine and the superiority of the factory over preindustrial business organization. From the standpoint of economy, therefore, the localization of differentiated but functionally integrated work processes near sources of fuel was the mainspring of industrial urbanism. Under conditions of belt-and-pulley power transmission, urban concentration was a means of (1) minimizing the costs of overcoming frictions in transport and communications and (2) maximizing internal economies of scale and external economies of agglomeration. Although the intellectual and social prerequisites for industrialization were not uniquely present in any one nation, an unusual confluence of commercial, geographic, and technological factors in Britain led to far-reaching changes in such strategic activities as textiles, transport, and iron. Britain became “the workshop of the world” and London its “head office.” Differentiation went so far that the cotton, wool, and iron districts became more specialized and productive, each proceeding within its own cycle of technical and organizational change. By the mid-19th century, similar if less-comprehensive industrial organization was evident in parts of France, the Low Countries, and the northeastern United States.

The concentration of the manufacturing labour force in mill towns and coke towns gradually undermined traditional social structures and relations. Problems of public order, health, housing, utilities, education, and morals were aggravated by the influx of newcomers from the countryside. The combination of high rural birth rates and the industrialization of agriculture raised production levels of foods and fibres but also caused more children to migrate to cities, as fewer were needed to work on the increasingly mechanized farms. Though the lowering of mortality in the 19th century was later offset by declines in fertility, the population of the more-industrialized nations boomed into the 20th century, and the greater part of the increment migrated to the larger towns. The outcome was rural depopulation and the urbanization of society. Local political and social institutions, often of medieval origin, were unable to cope with conditions that exaggerated poverty, disrupted family life, and complicated personal adjustment. Piecemeal reforms did little to improve the new milieu because, in the last analysis, the “city problem” arose not so much from the lack of public authority as from an unwillingness to pay the costs of social planning, public health, and civic improvement. Generations of urbanites therefore faced long work hours, poor work conditions, overcrowded housing, and inadequate sanitation. The populations of cities, however, adapted to the new urban norms, evidently striking a balance between the deleterious consequences of urbanization and the economic and cultural opportunities uniquely associated with the city.

In the century after 1850, world population doubled, and the proportion of people living in cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants rose from less than 7 percent to almost 30 percent. Between 1900 and 1950 the population living in large cities (100,000 plus) rose by 250 percent, the rate of increase in Asia being three times that in Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, the pattern of industrial urbanization—an overwhelmingly nonagricultural economy organized in a hierarchical system of different-sized cities ranging from one or more metropolitan centres at the top to a broad base of smaller-sized cities underneath—was still largely confined to the economically advanced areas: Europe, North America, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Australasia.

Meanwhile, industrial urbanism had entered its metropolitan phase. Especially in the United States, the widespread use of cheap electric power, the advent of rapid transit and communications, new building materials, the automobile, and rising levels of per capita personal income had led to some relaxation of urban concentration. City dwellers began moving out from older downtown areas to suburbs and satellite communities where conditions were thought to be less wearing on nerves and bodies. Rising central-area land values and property taxes, traffic congestion, decaying infrastructure, and street crime reinforced the exodus. At the city’s core the composition of the resident population came to include growing proportions of the aged, minority groups, and the very poor.

Just as populations shifted from city centres to suburbs and broader conurbations, manufacturing companies began building their production plants on suburban or rural sites, thereby taking advantage of cheaper land costs, lower labour expenses, less-cumbersome municipal regulation, smaller tax burdens, and, in many cases, more-efficient transportation routes. By the 21st century it was evident that advanced economies would depend more on human capital than on physical capital and on the production of services rather than the manufacture of goods; as a consequence, cities were shifting from loci of industrial production to centres of knowledge. Thus, while its advantages for manufacturers have diminished, the city remains a fundamental locus for the mass of specialized service activity that forms so large a part of the modern economy.