Is The Old Suburban Company Town Of The Industrial Age About To Re-Emerge In A High Tech Urban For

In Margaret Crawford's fascinating book, Building the Workman's Paradise, Verso 1995, a complex and nuanced picture of the American company town emerges sharply at odds with its more familiar Marxist caricature. By the time America got around to doing industrial, Americans were already well aware of the bleak dark dirty urban industrial cities of Britain made infamous by Charles Dickens. America - still the land of the radical Christian Utopian philosophy and one need only think of the Transcendental Movement of Emerson - supposed it could force the industrial factory through the die of New World Utopianism - and avoid the grim and gritty industrial squalor all too common across the UK.

While Crawford studies the company town through an architectural / philosophic lens, another writer Alex Tabarrok , examines its economics. Marxists frequently cite the existence of the 'company store', company owned housing, and use of company 'scrip' ( in place of currency ) as tactics of oppression and authoritarian relations of power. Tabarrok disagrees, arguing that if workers put their life savings in their own home in a company town it would be hard to recover if the company's fortunes waned and the worker was laid off, and that because of the company town's remoteness, privately owned stores could exploit their monopoly position - whereas the company store had the incentive to offer fair prices the better to attract and keep their workforce. And crucially Tabarrok points out that while the company towns were geographically isolated, the workers were NOT at all isolated from the national labor market. In fact most company towns paid wage rates above the national average in order to attract workers who would not otherwise relocate. Tabarrok sees a parallel in the offshore oil platforms of today. Oil rigs are essentially company towns - some with hundreds of employees - which are isolated and where life and work are much riskier than on land. In consequence these offshore jobs pay large premiums over their land based equivalents while giving workers perks not available to landlubbers such as multi month vacation time.

Radical anarcho-capitalists argue that the company town has been badly misrepresented by Marxist historians and unfairly maligned by progressive political opportunists - perhaps as a tactic to arrogate administrative power from the company and place company towns under political control. These 'captured' towns can then be re-purposed into into tax farms ruled by the political class. The result has been that bad security, bad roads, bad schools, and bad central planning of political rule replace the formerly good private company town administration of good roads, good schools, and good neighborhoods.

In any case there are many current indicators heralding a re-emergence of the company town. For instance most tech companies now have 'corporate campuses' - Apple's sprawling Apple Park in Cupertino - Google's vast Googleplex in Mountain View, while at the same time the company school is quietly re-appearing as the Design Tech School on Oracles Campus in Redwood California - and Ad Astra ( Latin for to the stars ) on SpaceX's (Elon Musk) Hawthorne California campus. Regrettably, and conspicuously absent in these re-emerging company towns, is company housing. It is this absence of company housing which is a big driver of the housing disruption / population displacement taking place in so many California cities most notably and disastrously in San Francisco's Bay area.

When one looks at the sprawling circular courtyard of Apple's Cupertino campus - one notes the missed opportunity to have included multistory residences and to have addressed a multitude of problems: Elimination of some 12,000 daily commuter trips and resultant energy savings, 12,000 freed up housing units taking the pressure off the existing housing stock, the waste of perhaps millions of hours consumed by unproductive commutes, and the millions of hours of productive or leisure time which would have been gained. Below is an alternative design where an entire company town is housed within a single building following out Harvey Corbett's 1920 future building concept discussed in more detail further down.

One can only speculate as to why so far at least tech companies shy away from restoring company housing to their neo-company towns. Perhaps a plausible explanation is to be found in the militant Marxist discourse dominating the relationship between landlord, tenant, and government. The moment property is rented, on the West Coast at least, the balance of power shifts decisively to the tenant. Tenants have an arsenal of politically devised weapons at their disposal with which to go after landlords. In the Reason article linked to above, it is explained that thousands of apartments stay vacant in San Francisco as landlords decline to take on the legal risks of renting.

As well Zoning Laws severely restrict what companies can do with their property frequently banning multi use projects. Randal O'Toole writes about the Quiet Revolution by which zoning laws originally intended to keep gritty industrial plants out of suburban residential developments have been reworked into weapons deployed to prevent undeveloped 'green' land from ever being developed at all.

Disruptive companies like Uber and AirBnB adopted a strategy of acting as if they still operate in free enterprise free market free society. They acted as if the laissez faire capitalism of the past still exists before the thicket of regulatory restraints and rules grew over it. In this way they were able to grow fast enough to gain widespread market acceptance before regulators, mired in their own bureaucratic inertia, could intervene.

Uber sprang up so fast and was adopted on such a large scale that for the most part regulators left it alone rather than incur the wrath of tens of millions of grateful consumers dependent on Uber especially to get out to and back from the airport.

And so what we are finally left to ponder is whether say in New York City we might expect a similar disruptor to bring forth or outfit an office building as a 21st century incarnation of the company town where work, residence, and leisure merge once more. One sees in the resimercial movement murmurs of such a merger promoting collaborative work in living room like areas. But how much more convenient to say nothing of productive would it be to incorporate dormitories and apartments in this scheme.

Here I would like to put in my two cents worth about the nature of work. Several phases come to mind: An Initial conceptual state - imaginative and fluid - and perhaps best fostered in repose. Then as ideas take shape and the contours are identified - a logical transition occurs to a second more concrete phase where thoughts are transcribed and drawn up perhaps while seated at one's desk. Now there can be no doubt that these first phases are best fostered in secluded, quiet quarters free of distraction. Once ideas have been written up and sketched out a follow on phase transitions to the open 'resimercial' plan where review and discussion are best undertaken.

The work process as imaged above calls for inclusion of the more public as well as more private spaces of residential architecture within the office environment. One could also add a word about Frank Lloyd Wright's often misunderstood credo of 'Natural Architecture' emphasizing design conducive to and exalting of the human life and which served to intensify the aesthetic

sensibility laden with its mystery and wonders. While good architecture provides the practical shelter and necessary appurtenances every individual needs, great architecture 'renders' them in such form and fashion as to exalt the individual, connect him with his fellows and larger realm of being, manifests them in ways not easily put into words but which nevertheless intensifies the great mystery of being and of the universe. Great architecture solves the practical problems of life while engendering a higher state of being, bringing forth in one that quality of experience James Joyce termed the 'sublime'. A building even though calculatedly enigmatic [ or a whole city for that matter as in the case of Wrights scheme for Los Angeles ] can still be wildly successful if that enigmatic form serves to further inspire and intensify this sense of sublime.

I mention all this only because regrettably modern architecture over the course of the last century has progressively strayed away from the dimension of the sublime to the point where nowadays it is largely absent. Today's buildings are deemed a success to the extent they minimize 'carbon footprints' - seemingly to the exclusion - and certainly the subordination - of almost every other consideration. The point is that good design accommodates the three phases of work, creates specialized space which facilitates them all the while doing so in exalting surroundings capable of ennobling the individual. And of course even considered from the more philistine perspective of the ROI, a great building elevating its occupants spirits cannot fail but to inspire in them their best and most creative works.

And so consider this view of an urban future from the 1920s. A hundred years ago it was completely plausible to believe the driving force in the city would be integrative: A building would multiply the number of functions it performed, would assemble the multiple aspects of life in a single structure where they could be artfully organized and thoughtfully arranged in space. At the same time what is so apparent is an implicit inclusiveness, an optimism, a sense of marvel and wonder anticipated in the imagined architecture of the future: Buildings will be capable of capably doing everything and comfortably accommodating everyone and do so in enchanting and pleasant places. It is as if the monumental ocean liner of the day functioned as the model for the city which was to come: One gets just this sense in this ocean liner cutaway. Perhaps the closest a building comes to incorporating all things for all people is the hotel as can be seen in this marvelous cutaway. Yet what happened in the intervening century ? What happened to prevent if not invert this delightful and sublime anticipation and expectation of a marvelous urban life to come ? And what is found in the city of today but its veritable antithesis ? Take New York. A delightfully imagined inclusiveness has given way to a pronounced exclusivity. The expectations for a middle class growing in size, wealth, and cultivation have vanished, replaced by an extravagantly wealthy elite curiously shorn of culture or cultivation. At the same time buildings have become 'siloed' in function, stripped of ornament, dull, featureless, sterile, mannerist, stripped of elegance, grandeur, charm. And perhaps the sole building in New York in which a commercial tenant lives in the building as well is Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue - before Trump was elected president. It is an open question whether the great and grand hopes and dreams for the city envisioned a hundred year ago will finally find expression in the next hundred years.