Utopia Control: Company Town
The constructed environment in which we live can be hostile, both in the context of individual buildings and in the context of larger cities. For example, homeless people are discouraged from resting on public benches by the menacing presence of spikes and other forms of exclusive design. From a global perspective, we can see the impact of the border in the hostility against immigration, as clearly shown on the Melilla border fence on the border between Morocco and Spain. This “hostility” can be found in numerous settlements around the world, settlements formed as a result of organic migration, or settlements premised on domination, such as company towns.
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A company town is easy to define. It is an economic institution, not a people-focused place, and the resident of the population is primarily the workers who continue to run the business. A single company provides products and services to its employees. Houses, stores, and common buildings in town are virtually all owned by the organization. Many of these towns are born of utopian ideas. This is a community vision that rejoices in working for a company, and the company appreciates providing basic needs. However, the nature of a company actually owning a town is that the ultimate goal is always to extract the labor force, and in promoting it, the company town ultimately seeks the management of residents, large and small. Means.
Amazon River Basin-There is no doubt that there is no better example of this than the urban planning experiment of American businessman Henry Ford at Ford Landia. The goal was ambitious – building new towns and rubber plantations in the Amazon rainforest. The secondary goal was, in effect, to “civilize” the jungle and form a local Brazilian workforce in the Fordism that exists in his American factory. Part of the undeveloped rainforest purchased from the Brazilian government was cleared to create a city, and the effort became one of the more extreme examples of worker management.
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Native Brazilian workers were forced to attend poetry readings and had to refrain from alcohol banned in the town. A 100-bed modern hospital, power plant, library, golf course and white clapboard house for employees were also built. Local knowledge is expected to be ignored in this project. The car was advertised as a recreation. That is, a 30-mile road was laid in Fordlândia. This road is rarely used. However, the utopian visualization of the town did not extend to the undivided community. This can be seen in the fact that American managers and Brazilian workers are assigned to different living areas. “Villa Americana” was a section with the best views of the city and flowing water, but Brazilian workers had to use the water supplied by the wells.
Ford’s plan to import a town in the Midwestern United States deep in the Amazon jungle ended up in a huge failure, as Brazilian workers apparently did not adapt to American-style housing and industrial work processes. I had to work during the hottest hours of the day. Worker riots in the 1930s caused a quiet and gradual decline in the town.
There is another kind of paternalistic experiment in Chile. It is the town of Umberstone. Now in the haunted town, it was developed for the extraction of potassium nitrate. From public buildings in Art Deco to dwellings reminiscent of art and craft style, many architectural influences shape the area. Due to the harsh climate, the infrastructure to meet the needs of the town’s workers ranged from refrigerated areas of agricultural products to industrial ovens for baking bread. As with Fordlândia, a solid hierarchy was apparent. The Arts & Crafts Bungalows house the person responsible for the mining business, as well as the upper middle class families in the Midwestern United States. Workers, on the other hand, shared a room that was effectively a barracks.
The grocery store was one of the largest buildings in the settlement, allowing workers to manage their wage usage at a different level. The money earned by the workers was given in the form of tokens, which could only be used for merchandise in general stores. This store was intentionally designed to be one of the city’s toughest and most complex buildings. Just inside the front door, there was a counter where tokens and pay checks were distributed. Virtually the only bank counter in Hamburg Stone.
Developed between 1872 and the mid-20th century, the town is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The heritage is a complex settlement heritage built on the basis of exploitation, which later led to an improvement in the workforce in the 1930s, reaching its current ghost town status.
The relationship between workers and businesses is by no means equal. The company town is, in effect, a physical manifestation of this relationship. In other words, worker comfort is a superficial goal, but worker management is a reality.
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