The City Is the Factory

The City Is the Factory
Author: Miriam Greenberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501708058

Urban public spaces, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, have become the emblematic sites of contentious politics in the twenty-first century. As the contributors to The City Is the Factory argue, this resurgent politics of the square is itself part of a broader shift in the primary locations and targets of popular protest from the workplace to the city. This shift is due to an array of intersecting developments: the concentration of people, profit, and social inequality in growing urban areas; the attacks on and precarity faced by unions and workers' movements; and the sense of possibility and actual leverage afforded by local politics and the tactical use of urban space. Thus, "the city"—from the town square to the banlieu—is becoming like the factory of old: a site of production and profit-making as well as new forms of solidarity, resistance, and social reimagining.We see examples of the city as factory in new place-based political alliances, as workers and the unemployed find common cause with "right to the city" struggles. Demands for jobs with justice are linked with demands for the urban commons—from affordable housing to a healthy environment, from immigrant rights to "urban citizenship" and the right to streets free from both violence and racially biased policing. The case studies and essays in The City Is the Factory provide descriptions and analysis of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles. Contributors Melissa Checker, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania; Els de Graauw, Baruch College, City University of New York; Kathleen Dunn, Loyola University Chicago Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University; Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz; Alejandro Grimson, Universidad de San Martín (Argentina); Andrew Herod, University of Georgia; Penny Lewis, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Stephanie Luce, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Lize Mogel, artist and coeditor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography; Gretchen Purser, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

Factory Girls

Factory Girls
Author: Leslie T. Chang
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2009-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385520182

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

After the Factory

After the Factory
Author: James J. Connolly
Publisher: Comparative Urban Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-05-23
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 9780739148242

After the Factory expores the challenges and opportunities facing the smaller industrial cities of America's heartland as they seek to reinvent themselves. It offers a unique, multidisciplinary look at communities often ignored by conventional urban studies and urban history scholarship.

The Factory

The Factory
Author: Hiroko Oyamada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 081122886X

The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, The Factory casts a vivid—and sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.

The Why Factor(y) and the Future City

The Why Factor(y) and the Future City
Author: Winy Maas
Publisher: Nai010 Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9789056627812

Founded by Winy Maas, The Why Factory concentrates on the production of models and visualizations for future cities. It runs independent research projects, PhD programs, architecture and urbanism studios, postgraduate studios at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and workshops and debates. One component of the thinktank is publishing a series of books and producing films. This volume is based on Maas' inaugural address upon assuming the position of Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology in 2009. It also includes transcripts and addresses from "My Future City," a Why Factory symposium, in which students, architects, urban planners, philosophers, politicians and engineers shared their visions for the city of the future.

Chicago Made

Chicago Made
Author: Robert Lewis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226477045

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.

Vertical Urban Factory

Vertical Urban Factory
Author: Nina Rappaport
Publisher: Actar
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2019-12-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781948765145

This revised edition focuses on the spaces of production in cities--both the modernist period and today--and the technologies that have contributed to shifts in factory architecture, manufacturing, and urban design. Vertical Urban Factory tracks the evolution of the vertical urban factory from the first industrial revolution to the present and provides an analysis of the political, social, and economic factors that have shaped today's global industrial landscape. Ultimately, it provokes new concepts for the futureof urban manufacturing, and the necessity of creating new paradigms for sustainable, self-sufficient urban industry. Illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, manufacturing process diagrams, and infographics by MGMT Design.

The Mirage Factory

The Mirage Factory
Author: Gary Krist
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0451496396

From bestselling author Gary Krist, the story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into reality Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California—bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges—seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here possible. D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture, gave L.A. its signature industry. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist who founded a religion, cemented the city’s identity as a center for spiritual exploration. All were masters of their craft, but also illusionists, of a kind. The images they conjured up—of a blossoming city in the desert, of a factory of celluloid dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under the California sun—were like mirages liable to evaporate on closer inspection. All three would pay a steep price to realize these dreams, in a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design that threatened to topple each of their personal empires. Yet when the dust settled, the mirage that was LA remained. Spanning the years from 1900 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.

Amoskeag

Amoskeag
Author: Tamara K. Hareven
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1995
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780874517361

How the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company shaped the social, ethnic, and economic existence of Manchester, New Hampshire during America's rise as a manufacturing power.

George Tsypin Opera Factory

George Tsypin Opera Factory
Author: George Tsypin
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-10-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781616895242

Based in New York City—in the grit, steel girders, and graffiti of the metropolis—George Tsypin's Opera Factory creates visions of towering gods, underwater kingdoms, constructivist reveries, skyscraping towers, and earth-bound angels. Tsypin's award-winning designs are produced around the world. This lavishly illustrated monograph introduces Tsypin's designs for twenty productions—including the musicals Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and The Little Mermaid; operas Oedipus Rex and the Ring Cycle; the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi; Cirque du Soleil's Oasis; and the Seaglass Carousel in Battery Park. Tsypin uses each project as a starting point for meditations on creativity and the fleeting nature of performance that will rivet designers, artists, performers, and anyone interested in the creative process.