ABSTRACT
It is both helpful, and unhelpful, to regard the city as a machine—helpful, as part of an analysis of systems of cultural production, and unhelpful as a reductive account of quasi-universal labor and capital processes. The idea of the city as machine is an awareness of industrial Europe: Many records of this in the discourses of the mid-nineteenth century might be adduced, of which Charles Dickens's account of Coketown in Hard Times (1854) might be taken as representative:
It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river than ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. 1
