In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country by Janet L. Polasky
  • Jamie L. Bronstein (bio)
Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country, by Janet L. Polasky ; pp. xii + 238. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010, $55.00.

In both Britain (read London) and Belgium (read Brussels), housing and transportation reformers faced a similar quandary in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: how could workers be encouraged to live outside crowded and squalid city centers? Despite significant differences in political economies and attitudes toward the private sector, reformers in both countries groped toward a similar solution: they advocated worker housing outside the cities, combined with a daily train commute. In Reforming Urban Labor, Janet L. Polasky documents these developments in great, if poorly organized, detail. [End Page 510]

The author of any good comparative history must make a case for the specific comparison she is making. Polasky argues that Britain and Belgium in the nineteenth century are fit countries for comparison because they experienced similar levels of industrialization and urbanization, took similar pride in their capital cities, and had similar timings in the process of urban renewal. Both cities (like many others at the time) had experienced waves of epidemic disease exacerbated by overcrowding. In both (as in most other industrialized countries at the time), experts were beginning to bring to bear statistical analysis on the question of workers’ life chances in urban versus rural areas.

But her argument that these two countries bear comparison is not completely convincing. By the end of the nineteenth century, greater London’s population was about twenty times larger than Brussels’s, spread over a geographic area that was about ten times larger. Thus, the scope of the public housing and transportation problem London faced was much different. Given that, as Polasky admits, mass transportation took off in many European and American cities at the same time, London and New York or Brussels and Boston might have made more interesting and relevant comparisons.

Belgium and Britain both had parliamentary systems in the nineteenth century, but their political contexts were very different. Britain’s railways had developed in an atmosphere of economic liberalism; railway companies existed to be profitable enterprises for their shareholders. Parliament pressured railway companies to add early-morning trains intended for workers’ commutes, but the Board of Trade refused to force railway companies to provide service. When the commuters themselves stormed the platforms, members of the London County Council pushed the Board of Trade to relieve overcrowded trains and provide more cheap tickets. After decades of agitation, a Select Committee, and a Royal Commission, the British government sternly wagged its finger at the railway companies. In contrast, Belgium’s national government, tinted with Catholic mutualism, consistently supported workingmen’s trains, viewing them as both a public utility and a means of advancing the nation’s infrastructure. While representatives of Belgian political parties argued about whether the trains were truly serving the interests of the workers, or whether the workers were being exploited for the benefit of industry, the trains continued to run.

In both Belgium and Britain, moralists linked rural areas and suburbs with ideal working-class family structures. Polasky argues that in Belgium, workers embraced these sentiments; many peasants either owned cottages or acquired them through the ministrations of private housing societies. The new train systems reached out to workers in their native villages, producing some ridiculously long commutes, but allowing them to retain their gardens, their pride in land- and homeownership, and their regional identities. Polasky argues that British workers were pushed out of their neighborhoods by slum clearance to a greater extent than they were pulled by the prospect of home and space. In fact, land hunger had a history among the British working classes, as the Chartist Land Plan, Freehold Land Societies, and the slogan “three acres and a cow” suggest, but this history is not discussed.

Polasky’s last chapter rapidly fast-forwards from the immediate post-Great War period through to 2010. In both Britain and Belgium, hopeful plans for garden cities gave way to boxy housing projects, although Belgium experienced less housing segregation by class...

pdf

Share