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

In the first decade of the 20th century, the County Council in London, England built over a thousand cottages for working class families in the outer reaches of the county at Totterdown Fields. The London County Council (lcc)’s tram ran to the edge of the estate, and two rail lines had stations about a mile away. Housing reformers hoped to attract regularly employed workers and their families away from their overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings in the centre of London to this and other new estates in outlying districts. Here, the environment would promote better health and improved morality. Reformers wanted workers to live outside the central districts of Brussels as well, encouraging them to stay in villages and commute to workplaces in the urban centre.

Janet Polasky outlines the attitudes of these reformers and the policies they spawned in a comparative study of innovations in working class housing and transportation in the decades preceding World War i. She argues convincingly for the interdependence of housing reform and transportation policy, as attempts to house workers outside central districts required affordable and available transportation: “Housing and transportation reforms were mutually dependent.” (135) The book reveals the similar concerns of reformers in Britain and Belgium, and it illuminates differences in policy approaches in the two countries. Her ability to draw together housing and transportation and to highlight significant patterns through the comparative approach makes this a valuable and at times fascinating study.

The book begins by explaining British and Belgian reformers’ view of the dangers of working class life in urban centres in the last decades of the 19th century. Observers decried the sanitary condition of slums, citing overcrowding and the spread of disease. In the eyes of the reformers, residents in these neighbourhoods also suffered moral degradation, alcoholism and promiscuity. Strikes and demonstrations in the 1880s contributed to concern about class conflict and the political threat of large urban working class populations. “Entombed in pestilential rookeries and impasses, respectable workers and the unemployable alike languished without the benefit of sunlight, beyond the gaze of the middle class.” (40) In both countries, reformers hoped that improved housing could transform the urban environment and workers themselves.

In Britain, philanthropists spearheaded the earliest efforts to improve working-class housing. Because of high land prices in central locations, most of these developments were blocks of flats. On the continent, a small number of industrialists built working-class housing estates. Some reformers envisioned cottages outside the central urban cores, and building associations and philanthropists began to experiment with this model on the outskirts of Brussels and London. By the 1880s, though, it was clear that these efforts were inadequate and the urban crisis appeared to be getting worse. In Belgium, legislation in 1889 established Patronage Committees with the authority to recommend housing projects for low-interest loans and to help workers purchase land and build homes. In Britain, legislation created the London County Council and empowered it to build housing for workers. The lcc cleared a large slum district in the East End and built the Boundary Street Estate, a complex of five-story blocks completed in 1897. Though in Belgium, private development was far more common, the central commune of Brussels did construct the Cité Hellemans, apartments for 2,000 residents in the centre of town.

Despite these experiments, cottages for regularly employed workers outside central urban zones seemed to promise a better solution, given the moral and political dangers of high density working-class districts. Reformers in Britain and Belgium shared a desire to foster a working-class population that embraced middle-class values and ways of life, enjoying privacy in their garden cottages. In Britain, reformers encouraged workers to move out of slum districts and into cottage developments. In Belgium, planners hoped that village dwellers seeking employment in Brussels would remain rooted in their villages and commute. Reformers in both countries hoped to convince workers to inhabit cottages where they and their families could enjoy...