Description: In the early twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company built an industrial empire with massive factory complexes and associated infrastructures. Henry Ford's 1915 plan to decentralize industrial manufacturing relied on moving key technical processes closer to sites of resource extraction while distributing elements of production. In Fordism and the City, Jay Cephas analyzes key infrastructures--from factories and mills to roads, rail lines, and canals--to trace the impact of automated, assembly-line production on the urban and rural landscapes of Michigan. The overwhelming scale of the Ford Motor Company's plant in Dearborn, the idyllic setting of its small village factories throughout the Rouge River corridor, and the remoteness of the company's iron ore mines and hardwood forests in the Upper Peninsula all played an important role. Under the rubric of "the industrial city," Fordism sought to replace conventional urbanism, reconfiguring factory production and then making its practices visible and intelligible to a consuming public through an industrial aesthetic. In doing so, Cephas shows, Fordism functioned as a normalizing force that helped to usher in the new industrial society.
Review Quotes: In this fascinating study, architectural historian Jay Cephas shows that Fordism was never confined to the assembly line, the factory complex, or the industrial city. It was, rather, a territorial formation that linked the machinery of production to landscapes of extraction and circulation through a vast industrial metabolism that included mines, forests, fields, waterways, highways, railroads, urban networks, and metropolitan centers. Fordism and the City is an essential scholarly resource for anyone interested in the interplay between labor, urbanism, technology, territory, and environment.--Neil Brenner, University of Chicago