Nineteenth-Century Industrial Urbanisation

Abstract

A new kind of city emerged during the nineteenth century, built on productive power, massed population and industrial technology. By the end of the century, this new city had been credited with the creation of a system of social life founded on entirely new principles. These principles, codified by a succession of social philosophers, were accepted as axiomatic by both academics and the public at large for the first half of the twentieth century. As new problems in the new cities produced a variety of social movements, the principles became the ‘conventional wisdom’ informing the public intervention that sought to correct the problems. In that intervention are to be found the roots of modern urban planning, which has sought to regulate or direct urbanisation in the twentieth century so as to change its human consequences. Thus, as a basis for understanding twentieth-century urbanisation, we must begin with the nineteenth-century experience. That is the purpose of this chapter.