As a town grows in size the value of the ground on which it stands grows so rapidly that it becomes economically available only for certain classes of industrial undertaking, in which the occupation of central space is an element of prime importance. In all large commercial cities the residential quarters are driven gradually farther and farther away from the centre by incessant encroachments of business premises. The city of London and the "down town" quarter of New York are conspicuous examples of this displacement of residential buildings by commercial. The richer inhabitants are the earliest and quickest to leave. As the factory or the shop plants itself firmly among the better-class dwelling-houses, these inhabitants pass in large numbers to the outskirts of the town, forming residential suburbs which, for some time at any rate, are free from the specific evils of congestion. This encroachment of the factory and the shop at first has little effect, if any, in thinning the residential population of the district. While the shopkeepers and their employees live in the neighbourhood, and the factory workers can afford to pay the rent for houses or lodgings near their work, the central population will grow denser than before. But as the city grows in size and commercial importance, an increasing number of the most central sites will pass from manufactory premises and shops into use for warehouses and business offices, and for other work in connection with distribution and finance. The workers on these premises will, in the case of the wealthier, be unwilling, in the case of the poorer be unable, to live near their work; where factories and shops remain, the great mass of the employees will not be able to afford house-rents determined by this competition of a more valuable commercial use of land. So we find that the number of inhabitants of the city of London diminishes in each recent census, and the same is true as regards the most valuable portions of Paris, New York, and other large cities. This decentralising force is, however, only in full operation in the very centre of the largest cities. The first effect of the competition of commercial with living premises is to raise house-rents and to drive the poorer population into narrower, less commodious, and less sanitary dwellings. Where ground landowner and builder have a free hand the market value of central ground for small, lofty, cheap-built slums can be made to hold its own for a long time with the business premises which surround them. Even when ground value has risen so high as to displace many of these slums, the tendency is for the latter to spring up and thicken in districts not far removed from the centre. Thus in London the densest population is found in Whitechapel and St. George's in the East. Indeed, there is evidence that these districts have already reached "saturation point," that is to say, the pressure of business demands for ground, the increased competition of the dwellers themselves, and the growing restrictions imposed by law and public opinion upon the construction of the most "paying" forms of house property, prevent any further growth of population in these parts. As this saturation point is reached in one district, the growth of dense population goes on faster in the outlying districts, and, with forms which vary with local conditions, the same economic forces manifest themselves with similar results over a wider area. The poorer population shifts as short a distance as it can, and then only when driven by a rise of rents. Even when it moves somewhat farther out it seldom gets far enough to escape the centralising forces. Residential working-class districts like West Ham become rapidly congested by the constant flow of population from more central places. Moreover, the same decentralising forces are set up in the large suburban districts, by the planting there of factories and other industrial works designed to take advantage of a large supply of labour close at hand, and land procurable at a lower rental. This applies also to many of the suburbs originally chosen as residential quarters of the well-to-do classes. The whole western district of London, comprised by Kensington, Notting Hill, Hammersmith, etc., contains large and designed areas of dense poverty and overcrowding. So far as the mass of poorer workers in London and other large cities are concerned, it would appear that their endeavour to escape beyond the limits of congested city life has hitherto been unavailing: the decentralising forces of rising ground rents, uncomfortable and insanitary dwellings, are ever at work, but the centralising forces set up by any large number who seek an outlet in the same direction, with close spacial limitations to their migrating tendency, are too strong. High rents, a fuller appreciation of the hygienic advantages of more space, and of proximity to country air and country scenes, have induced an increasing number of the "middle" classes, and even of those who, in a pecuniary sense, form the upper working class, to incur the expenditure of time, trouble, and railway fares involved in living sufficiently far from the centre to avoid the centralising pressure. The most important practical problem of social reform to-day is how to secure this option of extra-city life for the mass of city workers. If the economies of low ground rent and slightly cheaper labour were sufficiently large to induce the establishment of manufactories at considerable distances from large centres of population, we might look in time to see the large industrial town give place to a number of industrial villages, gathered round some single large factory or "works." The growing facilities of communication with large towns at increased distances, afforded by recent expansions of railway service, and by improvements in telegraphic and telephonic media, have done something towards this form of decentralisation. Round Manchester and other larger northern manufacturing towns an increasing number of factories are springing up; in the United States the same phenomenon is still commoner. Smaller rents, cheaper living, lower wages, especially in textile mills where women are largely employed, and lastly, more submissive labour, are everywhere the economic stimuli of this decentralisation of manufacture. Assuming that some more cheaply and easily transmissible motor-power can be found for manufacture, and that a cheap and readily available transport service by steam or electricity is widely spread, it seems not unlikely that the economies of decentralised manufacture may widely or even universally outweigh the primary centralising economies which created our great manufacturing towns. Whether a wide diffusion of industrial villages, which might be of a size and structure to reproduce in a somewhat less virulent form many of the physical and moral vices of the larger towns, and which possibly might retard or nullify some of the educative and elevating influences springing from the organisation and co-operative action of large masses of workers, can be regarded as a desirable substitute or remedy for our congested city life, is open to grave doubt. A whole country like England, thickly blotched at even intervals by big industrial villages comprised of a huge factory or two with a few rectangular streets of small, dull, grimy, red-brick cottages, and one or two mansions standing inside their parks at the side remote from the factories, would, from an æsthetic point of view, be repulsive to the last degree; and out of a country, the whole of which was thus ordered for pure purposes of industrial economy, it is difficult to believe that any of the higher products of human effort could proceed. But the possibility of some such outcome of the decentralising forces already visible must not be ignored. It is even likely that the labour movement, advancing as it does more rapidly in large manufacturing centres than elsewhere, may, by increasing the freedom and power of labour associated upon a large scale, apply an additional stimulus to the entrepreneur to place his business undertakings so as to make strongly combined action of labourers more difficult. American manufacturers are distinctly actuated by this motive in selecting the locality of their factories, and have been able in many cases to maintain a despotic control over the workers which would be quite impossible were their factories planted in the middle of a large city.[287]
§ 9. This method of partial decentralisation depends in large measure, it is evident, upon such progress in the transport services for persons, goods, and intelligence as shall minimise the inconvenience of a less central position, rendering the location of the business a matter of comparative indifference. But it is to improved transport services that we may look to facilitate a kind of decentralisation, the net gain of which is less dubious than that arising from the substitution of a large number of industrial villages for a small number of industrial towns. Is it not possible for more town-workers to combine centralised work with decentralised life—to work in the town but to live in the country? May not this advantage, at present confined to the wealthier classes, be brought within the reach of the poorer classes? Some small progress has been made of recent years towards the realisation of this ideal. Three chief difficulties stand in the way of success: the length of the working-day, which makes the time required for travelling to and from a distant home a matter of serious consideration; the defective supply of convenient, cheap, and frequent trains or other quick means of conveyance; the irregularity and uncertainty of tenure in most classes of labour, which prevents the establishment of a settled house chosen with regard to convenient access to a single point of industry. Some recent progress has been made in large cities, such as Vienna, Paris, and London, in providing workmen's trains and by the cheapening of train and 'bus fares; but such experiments are generally confined within too narrow an area to achieve any satisfactory amount of decentralisation, for the interests of private carrying companies demand that the largest number of passengers shall travel from the smallest number of stations. It would appear that considerable extension of direct public control over the means of transport will be required, in order to secure to the people the full assistance of modern mechanical appliances in enabling them to avoid the mischief of over-crowded dwellings. For such purposes the railway has now replaced the high-road, and we can no more afford to entrust the public interest in the one case to the calculating self-interest of private speculation than in the other case. A firm public control in the common interest over the steam and electric railways of the future seems essential to the attainment of adequate decentralisation for dwelling purposes. Private enterprise in transport, working hand in hand with private ownership of land, will only substitute for a single mass of over-crowded dwellings a number of smaller suburban areas of over-crowded dwellings. The bicycle alone, among modern appliances of mechanical speed, can safely be entrusted to the free private control of individuals, and, if one may judge by the remarkable expansion of its use, it seems likely to afford no trifling assistance to the decentralising tendencies.
§ 10. The removal of the other two barriers belongs to that joint action of labour organisation and legislation which aims at building up a condition of stable industrial economy. One of the most serviceable results of that shortening of the working-day, upon which public attention is so powerfully concentrated, would be the assistance it would render to enable workmen and workwomen to live at a longer distance from their work. So long, however, as a large proportion of city workers have no security of tenure in their work, are liable at a day's or a week's notice, for no fault of their own, to be obliged to seek work under another employer in a distant locality, or if employed by the same master to be sent to a distant job, now to find themselves without any work at all, at another time to have to work all hours to make up a subsistence wage, it is evident that these schemes of decentralisation can be but partial in their application. An increased stability both in the several trades and in the individual businesses within the trade is a first requisite to the establishment of a fixed healthy home for the industrial worker and his family.
§ 11. It is, however, unlikely that any wide or lasting solution of the problem of congested town life will be found in a sharp local severance of the life of an industrial society which shall abandon the town to the purposes of a huge workshop, reserving the country for habitation. The true unity of individual and social life forbids this abrupt cleavage between the arts of production and consumption, between the man and his work. It is only in the case of the largest and densest industrial cities, swollen to an unwieldy and dangerous size, that such methods of decentralisation can in some measure be applied. In these monstrous growths machinery of decentralisation may be evoked to undo in part at any rate the work of centralising machinery. In smaller towns, where the circumference bears a larger proportion to the mass, a spreading of the close-packed population over an expanded town-area will be more feasible, and will form the first step in that series of reforms which shall humanise the industrial town. The congestion of the poorer population of our towns, and the struggle for fresh air and elbow-room which it implies, is the most formidable barrier to the work of transforming the town from a big workshop into a human dwelling-place, with an individual life, a character, a soul of its own. The true reform policy is not to destroy the industrial town but to breathe into it the breath of social life, to temper and subordinate its industrial machine-goods-producing character to the higher and more complex purposes of social life. An ample, far-sighted, enlightened, social control over the whole area of city ground, whether used for dwellings or for industrial purposes, is the first condition of the true municipal life. The industrial town, left for its growth to individual industrial control, compresses into unhealthily close proximity large numbers of persons drawn together from different quarters of the earth, with different and often antagonistic aims, with little knowledge of one another, with no important common end to form a bond of social sympathy. The town presents the single raw material of local proximity out of which municipal life is to be built. The first business of the municipal reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it take shape in civic activities and institutions, which shall not only safeguard the public welfare against the encroachments of private industrial greed, but shall find an ever ampler and nobler expression in the æsthetic beauty and spiritual dignity of a complex, common life—all this work of transformation lies in front of the democracy, grouped in its ever-increasing number of town-units.
FOOTNOTES:
[267] According to Arthur Young, in 1770 half the population was already urban. But though the townward drift, owing in large measure to the land-hunger of the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, and the labour-saving economy of large farming, was clearly visible before the development of machine-industry, it is probable that Young's estimate goes beyond the facts.
[268] Mr. Cannan points out that this is due on the one hand to the healthier conditions of the towns whose natural increase is larger; on the other hand, to an increased migration from the rural parts to foreign countries. ("The Decline of Urban Immigration," National Review, January 1894.)
[269] Ravenstein, Statistical Journal, June 1889.
[270] Preliminary Report (c. 6422), p. 23.