Building the Workingman's Paradise by Margaret Crawford - 9780860916956

Building the Workingman's ParadiseThe Design of American Company Towns\nAuthor(s): Margaret Crawford\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Verso Books, United Kingdom\nImprint: Verso Books\nISBN-13: 9780860916956, 978-0860916956\nSynopsis\nThis innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism-the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics throug.