Industrial Economy and Agrarian Urbanism

Abstract

The proposition of a “horizontal metropolis” and this publication’s examination of radical projects for a horizontal urbanism recall the correlation of industrial economy and agrarianism evident in the work of many progressive urbanists over the past century. The agrarian and the urban are two categories of thought that have more often than not been opposed to one another. Across many disciplines, and for many centuries, the city and the country have been called upon to define one other through a binary opposition. This essay revisits the history of urban form conceived through the spatial, ecological, and infrastructural implications of agricultural production. In the projects that form this alternative history, agricultural production is conceived as a formative element of the city’s structure, rather than being considered external to it.

Industry will decentralize itself. If the city were to decline, no one would rebuild it according to its present plan.

—Henry Ford, 1922, as quoted by Ludwig Hilberseimer 1949

Ford’s precise formulation was: “Industry will decentralize. There is no city that would be rebuilt as it is, were it destroyed—which fact is in itself a confession of our real estimate of our cities.” (Crowther and Ford 1922, p. 192). Hilberseimer published his slightly amended version in “Cities and Defense,” 1945, and reprinted in Pommer et al. (1988), pp. 89–93.