ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the definition, origin, and organization of the factory—the industrial building that characterized the industrial system of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—and the relationships between the factory and the city at large.
In the evolution of factories, control was gradually removed from the craftsman or production worker and transferred to engineers and managers. Factory design became almost completely determined by the efficient movement of materials and products. Factory location, at the same time, was driven by the cost of land, by zoning (in the United States) that removed manufacturing from other uses, and by the co-evolution of successive transportation systems—waterways, railroads, and finally highways—that optimized efficiency among the various elements of supply and distribution chains. The result was a physical separation of factory zones from the rest of the city, supporting an industrial system that was increasingly alien from everyday domestic life.
In these respects, since the factory building houses only part of the production process, the city (and places beyond it) is the geographic “field” in which production takes place. But the factories, warehouses, and connecting links, although widely dispersed, form a network that is functionally separate from the city in which it is embedded.
