Capitalist City

The Nascent Capitalist City: The Urban Space as a Living Laboratory of Capitalism

Since the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels, the modern urban phenomenon has been intimately linked to capitalism as a mode of production and social reproduction. In that book the young Engels famously described industrializing English cities such as Manchester, London, and Sheffield as unique laboratories of nascent manufacturing capitalism. The newly built working-class neighborhoods showed conditions of social alienation and deprivation that were typical of developing capitalist societies. In first-generation capitalist cities, the social divisions of capitalism were paradigmatically translated on a spatial level: The advent of capitalist urbanization had led to a simultaneous process of decomposition of the old city center and of sociospatial segregation between the lower classes and the upper classes. The making of the capitalist city was characterized, on the whole, by the coexistence of antinomic phenomena of order and disorder, of dissolution of the previous forms of spatial organization, and of creation of a fragmented urban environment.

Engels's pioneering work has been a crucial source of inspiration in subsequent streams of research on the capitalist city: most notably, the sociobehavioralist literature investigating the capitalist city as a laboratory of social hardship that gave rise to the so-called Chicago School from the 1920s onward; more recently, in the 1970s, the scholarship that theorized and widely discussed the relationship between capitalism and the urban process, inaugurating the influential tradition of Marxist urban studies. Similar to what [Page 110]Manchester meant for Engels, Chicago was approached by twentieth-century urban sociologists as a paradigmatic example of the contemporary capitalist city. The rapid and massive population growth that had taken place in the city of Chicago during the last decades of the nineteenth century had shed light on a number of social problems and related deviant behaviors such as deprivation, poor living conditions, alcoholism, and homicides, which were associated with the rise of capitalism. The members of the Chicago School empirically investigated these phenomena and linked their rise and characteristics to the specific environmental conditions of the urban areas in which they appeared and developed. Urban social problems were thus described by Chicago urban scholars in terms of environment and human ecology rather than social structure and the capitalist mode of production. In this context, not only the crucial relationship between capitalism and the city but also related issues such as the role played by the state and other political agencies in the evolutionary paths of capitalist urbanization remained overlooked and undertheorized. The capitalist city was approached merely as a spatial context in which social problems had to be investigated and analyzed (starting from the assumption that the environment of large industrial cities intensifies such problems) rather than as an object of study itself and thus as an ontologically autonomous social entity.

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