The essays in this collection seek to challenge accepted scholarship on the rural-urban divide. Using case studies from the UK, Europe and America, contributors examine complex rural-urban relationships of conflict and cooperation. The volume will be of interest to those researching society and politics, criminology, literature and demographics.
Between 1850 and the 1890s, farmers in Middlesex County participated in and experienced the growth of the City of London, Ontario, as it diversified economically and became a regional industrial hub. In doing so, agriculturalists shaped and reshaped their social and economic networks to take advantage of the city's offerings, in turn enhancing their own neighbourhoods and communities. Using an HGIS (historical geographic information system), this dissertation uncovers the rural/urban relationship by examining the networks of the county's farm families via the diaries of the Errington, Glen, and Adams families of southern Middlesex. It discusses three types of farmers' networks: two that were local, which are termed "neighbourhood" and "community" networks, and another that was "distant," which involved interaction with urban centres, in particular the City of London. By looking at the alterations that rural people made to their social and economic lives, this thesis shows that it was at the daily level that families experienced, encouraged, and negotiated the North American urban phenomenon. It argues that local networks did not suffer at the expense of distant networks. Producing for distant networks actually helped develop and maintain local networks of production, exchange, and sociability. The analysis follows the lead of a number of historians who have highlighted the relationships between nineteenth-century rural and urban centres. My study's close, family-level focus allows for the mapping of farmers' daily patterns of local production and exchange. It considers their adoption of innovative agricultural technologies and use of improved transportation infrastructure, and it analyzes all this information within the context of changes in the families' life cycles and their growing participation in urban-oriented trade networks. This thesis finds that though the contexts of trade changed and the frequency of interaction with cities increased, the pattern of rural production and urban buying and selling did not. Into the 1890s, farmers continued producing goods in the countryside within their local networks and trading with cities via their distant networks. Similarly, farmers' social networks incorporated new developments, but remained relatively persistent in their emphasis on home and church-based association throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.
The rural is often understood as marginalized, on the edges of cities, and rarely visible in print culture centers. What is more, the rural is typically stereotyped as marginal in terms of intelligence, sophistication, and influence. Locating Rural Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Writings, therefore, shows the inherent complexity and dignity of rural cultures and their impact on the wider world. What is more, my research recovers, both historically and spatially, how rural cultures are underrepresented in literary studies. While traditional scholarship tends to focus on how rural voices symbolize or contribute to understandings about national identity, literary studies tend to limit attention to ways that the urban-centered, industrialized nation oppresses its own agrarian rural communities. My dissertation project, therefore, contributes to this conversation by addressing the following major themes: 1). Dismantling stereotypes of the hypermasculine industrial nation and the feminized rural region, 2). Revising how rural voices and tastes are romanticized as nationalized, homogenized ideals, and 3). Introducing new scholarship about the tensions urbanization brings to rural cultures' sensibilities associated with gender and social-class. For my primary sources, I analyze major works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as understudied, nontraditional texts such as cookery, gastronomical, and agricultural writings. More broadly, I examine how nineteenth-century British texts represent rural engagement with the global. Nineteenth-century British regions, both the urban and the rural, together, experienced international, cosmopolitan relationships as a result of the increased mobility that emerged from industrialization, the railway, and other means of transport. A cosmopolitan society, in modern times, is regarded as progressive and multicultural whereas rural societies have been viewed as more traditional and culturally limited. I posit, however, that nineteenth-century rural representations are cosmopolitan, complex, and connected to cultures outside of their own supposedly fixed geographical, class, and gendered affiliations. In short, I look at the ways in which many rural representations tend to ignore local differences and rethink how these representations actually establish, however subtly, their local markers of distinction within urbanized, cosmopolitan experiences.
American urbanites once lived alongside livestock and beasts of burden. But as cities grew, human-animal relationships changed. The city became a place for pets, not slaughterhouses or working animals. Andrew Robichaud traces the far-reaching consequences of this shift--for urban landscapes, animal- and child-welfare laws, and environmental justice.
"A remarkably detailed, knowing, critical, and even-handed study of one of the most dramatic, complex, and prophetic sociologists of our time". -- Robert K. Merton, author of On the Shoulders of Giants. "A major contribution to the history of sociology". -- Robert Bierstedt, author of American Sociological Theory.
A comprehensive and detailed overview of the active regeneration, rehabilitation and revitalisation of architectural heritage. The combined processes of globalisation, urbanisation, environmental change, population growth and rapid technological development have resulted in an increasingly complex, dynamic and interrelated world, in which concerns about the meaning of cultural heritage and identity continue to grow. As the need for culturally and environmentally sustainable design grows, the challenge for professionals involved in the management of inherited built environments is to respond to this ever-changing context in a critical, dynamic and creative way. Our knowledge and understanding of the principles, approaches and methods to sustainably adapt existing buildings and places is rapidly expanding. Architectural Regeneration contributes to this knowledge-base through a holistic approach that links policy with practice and establishes a theoretical framework within which to understand architectural regeneration. It includes extensive case studies of the regeneration, rehabilitation and revitalisation of architectural heritage from around the world. Different scales and contexts of architectural regeneration are discussed, including urban, suburban, rural and temporary. At a time when regeneration policy has shifted to the recognition that ‘heritage matters’ and that the historic environment and creative industries are a vital driver of regeneration, an increasing workload of architectural practices concerns the refurbishment, adaptive re-use or extension of existing buildings. As a result, this book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, historic conservation, urban and environmental design, sustainability, and urban regeneration, as well as for practitioners and decision makers working in those fields.
First published in 1977, Urban Education in the 19th Century is a collection based on the conference papers of the annual 1976 conference for the History of Education Society. The book illustrates a variety of ways of elucidating the connections between education and the city, mainly in nineteenth-century Britain. Essays cover political, geographical, demographic and socio-structural aspects of urbanization. There is an emphasis on comparative studies of urban educational developments and attention is paid to the perceptions of the nineteenth-century city and its problems, especially for child life, as well as to the realities of urban change
