Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country (review)

Polasky explains the origins of working-class suburbs and of commuting to work in London and Brussels with reference to English and Belgian reformers concerned with the relegation of the urban labor force to unhealthy slums. This study predates the usual emphasis on interwar and postwar social housing, focusing instead on the decades before World War I. Polasky presents a finely designed comparative study of the social engineering that linked housing and transportation reforms, and of the social good that they were supposed to engender: Students of urban history will recognize such familiar reformers as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Emile Vandervelde, but this book places them in the context not only of their research activities but also of the social and political struggle to win better housing for workers.

Polasky analyzes the prose of these reformers to expose its bourgeois assumptions—for example, the notion that workers who had a cottage where they could return to their wives at the end of the day would not drink or raise corrupted children. Polasky elucidates her findings with epigraphs, generous maps, and contemporary illustrations. Moreover, she combines her data regarding the populations of London and Brussels in single graphs to facilitate comparison. Most importantly, she is able to present a complex, intertwining, up-to-date history of two political and cultural spaces by designing chapters around themes common to both of them, showing both similarities and differences. In short, Reforming Urban Labor is a tour de force of comparative history.

The book opens with a portrait of the overcrowded capital cities before moving to reformers’ schemes for improvement—first workmen’s railway systems linking them to suburban dwellings and then to what the Belgians called “le cottage” housing. Subsequently, Polasky shifts from an exclusive focus on reformers—an all-purpose identifier that covers men of varied political persuasions—to the politics of reform that included demonstrations by irate, unhappy working-class commuters. Mixed reports on the outcomes of suburban housing follow. The final chapter—“Commuting Labor, 1918–2010”—offers a sweep of sobering insights: The development of social housing may have produced a stable, law-abiding population, but it also resulted in segregation by class (Britain) and local identity (Belgium). Innovative programs initiated after World War I were doomed by the Depression, and the depredations of World War II turned developers to high-density housing. In Britain, the fate of social housing adapted to the party in power, and continued, along with railway transportation, to be more at the mercy of private enterprise than it was in Belgium.

Once again, at the end of the twentieth century, Europeans—now the European Union—recognize the intimate connections between land use, housing, and transportation policies, struggling to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems exacerbated by the automobile. Polaskey notes that “the dreams shared by the Belgian and the British reformers confronting the crisis of industrialization in the nineteenth century had become a reality a century later, but a reality that brought with it a new cycle of challenges” (196). This book explains the way in which these initial dreams were realized, albeit partially and imperfectly.