Building the Working City Designs on Home and Life in Boomtown Detroit, 1914-1932.

Housing;Detroit;Fordism;History (General);Humanities;Architecture

McCulloch, MichaelGlover, William J. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Housing;    Detroit;    Fordism;    History (General);    Humanities;    Architecture;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113446/mccullmp_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The modern worker’s home made Detroit’s Fordist industrialization possible. Between the 1914 announcement of Ford’s ;;Five Dollar Day” and the Great Depression, Detroit industrialists, real estate developers and workers produced a building boom in housing, reshaping the urban society and negotiating the terms of what Antonio Gramsci called ;;a new type of worker and of man.” Expanding the architectural history of Fordism beyond the factory, this dissertation argues that it was through the modernization of the larger city—a Fordist Urbanism dominated by worker’s housing developments between the city’s peripheral industrial plants—that Detroit’s Fordist culture was constructed. Industrialists promoted modern worker’s housing, pursuing social control of the city’s largely-immigrant workforce, but shifted the risk of housing construction costs to individual workers by pushing them to seek houses on the open market. Real estate developers responded, and with government support built tens of thousands of bungalows and duplexes for sale to workers on credit. Realtors presented homeownership as a source of financial security for workers yet a realty culture of speculative investment and racial segregation undermined that security from the beginning. At the same time workers had significant agency in this city-building process. They produced more than industrial products in Fordist Detroit, making domestic lives and identities in the pluralistic ways that they chose, outfitted, lived in and cared for their homes, giving meaning and purpose to their routinized labor. Detroit’s industrial modernization—in and through its modern worker’s houses—elaborated crises of racial violence and home foreclosure in the mid 1920s and early 1930s, in which workers fought against one another, and ultimately in solidarity, demanding that the Fordist promise of hard work in exchange for domestic security be honored. Detroit’s houses of the early twentieth century—the extant and the demolished—still contain a great deal: a history of power negotiated through the modernization of the built environment. This past suggests that the city’s future housing—its design, location, financing and use—can influence the management of risk within society, the social construction of difference, and workers’ continued struggle for security.