Reforming Urban Labor is a history of the nineteenth-century
social reforms designed by middle-class progressives to domesticate
the labor force. Industrial production required a concentrated
labor force, but the swelling masses of workers in the capitals of
Britain and Belgium, the industrial powerhouses of Europe,
threatened urban order. At night, after factories had closed,
workers and their families sheltered in the shadowy alleyways of
Brussels and London. Reformers worked to alleviate the danger,
dispersing the laborers and their families throughout the suburbs
and the countryside. National governments subsidized rural housing
construction and regulated workmen's trains to transport laborers
nightly away from their urban work sites and to bring them back
again in the mornings; municipalities built housing in the suburbs.
On both sides of the Channel, respectable working families were
removed from the rookeries and isolated from the marginally
employed, planted out beyond the cities where they could live like,
but not with, the middle classes.
In Janet L. Polasky's urban history, comparisons of the two
capitals are interwoven in the context of industrial Europe as a
whole. Reforming Urban Labor sets urban planning against the
backdrop of idealized rural images, links transportation and
housing reform, investigates the relationship of middle-class
reformers with industrial workers and their families, and explores
the cooperation as well as the competition between government and
the private sector in the struggle to control the built environment
and its labor force.
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