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Urban historians have long portrayed suburbanization as the result of a bourgeois exodus from the city, coupled with the introduction of streetcars that enabled the middle class to leave the city for the more sylvan surrounding regions. Demonstrating that this is only a partial version of urban history, Manufacturing Suburbs reclaims the history of working-class suburbs by examining the development of industrial suburbs in the United States and Canada between 1850 and 1950. Contributors demonstrate that these suburbs developed in large part because of the location of manufacturing beyond city

From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago's character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago's story as a reflection of America's industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, Chicago Made explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape. Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city's outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America.

For urban historians and urban historical geographers, the relevance and meaning of the city as a driver of human history is central to what we do, both theoretically and empirically. For some, the question of how to define what a city does is a pressing one. For many of us, though, the question is rarely raised; it resides in that murky place behind our writing and thinking, and has little direct or conscious play over how we go about doing our daily work. Historical geographers, with their greater emphasis on theory and spatial relations, are more likely than historians, trained as they are to think through narrative, empirical evidence and temporality, to explore the city's role in explaining social change. Despite this difference, the fact remains that only a handful of urban historical scholars of whatever stripe are actively interested in thinking through the scope and significance of urban agency. The fact that few openly grapple with the question of urban agency, of course, does not mean that we do not work with some understanding of the city's ontological status. All of us do, for better or worse.

ABSTRACT:Industrial policy has long been considered a federal responsibility. Indeed, most scholars date modern local economic development programmes as starting in the 1960s. Before that, in this view, industrial policy wasad hoc, unco-ordinated and fragmented. In this article, I argue that the origins of modern industrial policy initiated by the local state slowly emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Chicago. Using an assortment of sources, I show that a new type of industrial policy was forged in the conflict over the 1923 zoning ordinance. The city's real-estate, financial and political elites were able to mobilize information, science, funding, individuals and arguments to convince industrialists that zoning was to their advantage. In the process, the city's industrial interests were able to frame the new zoning ordinance to their ends.

The devastating conditions of the Great Depression forced manufacturers to rethink their approach to workplace control, economic policy, and production practices. Although we know a great deal about how industries responded to the depression, we know very little about the changes implemented by firms. This is unfortunate as firms in the same industry face quite different problems, possess dissimilar work cultures, construct an array of production formats, and have access to a range of financial resources. Based on a literature that documents the variety of strategies devised by industries and firms, this paper shows how four Canadian textile firms—two cotton and two hosiery and knitting—reacted to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. In the face of a different array of conditions, each firm devised different restructuring strategies. The large cotton corporations responded by combining mechanization, product line change, and a new division of labor. The smaller, more competitive hosiery and knitting firms, on the other hand, imposed either a harsh regime of scientific management or conservative, piecemeal changes. In the midst of restructuring the workplace, manufacturers reasserted their prerogatives of managerial authority, selectively took advantage of the opportunities opened up by economic crisis, and created a new regime of industrial-state regulations.

In this article, it is argued that the North American industrial district was a metropolitan‐centred one that drew extensively on regional resources, skills, capital, and information. The Chicago printing industry between 1880 and 1950 is used as a case study to demonstrate that industries were linked at various scales: from the factory district to the metropolis and the region. A wide range of sources (manufacturing censuses, government reports, industrial journals, bankruptcy records) is employed to establish how the intricate set of relations and transactions formed metropolitan industrial districts.