The Nature of the Company Town

The company town, a settlement completely owned, built and operated by an individual or corporate entrepreneur, is essentially a temporary pioneering device, especially suited to conditions obtaining in nations undergoing rapid economic development. In economic pioneering the town is used to open up previously unexploited territory. As a method of social pioneering it is a means of uplifting and moulding the worker through the socioreligious ideals of the philanthropic industrialist. In both cases, however, the town's raison d'etre is the lack of initiative on the part of non-company private enterprise or local government in providing a total infrastructure for the new community. Coming into existence by default, the company town throve after the late eighteenth century in western Europe and areas of white colonial settlement, and, to a lesser extent, in their political and economic colonies. In general, extractive company towns have been the product of economic pioneering, and manufacturing towns of socio-economic forces. A typology of the company town includes some discussion of its characteristic social, economic and political features. Urban form and planning are considered in detail; the deliberate company policy of residential segregation by class is illustrated by a case-study. With the reduction of social and political isolation through the widespread use of air and motor transport and the rise of welfare state policies, the company town has tended to disappear in advanced economies. It still finds expression, however, in remote regions and in developing economies, whether imposed by Western capitalism or of indigenous origin, as in Japan. THOUGH geographers have long been concerned with the locational analysis of economic activity, less emphasis has been placed on a consideration of the physical structures involved in the pursuance of entrepreneurial activity. In much the same way, transport geographers have traditionally been concerned with the influence of transport media on other patterns; only recently has interest been aroused in the physical pattern and structure of communications media (J. H. Appleton, I962; K. J. Kansky, I963). Yet whether the concern is with private agricultural estates in Scotland or South America, with tropical plantations, logging camps or desert mining towns, it is clear that the overall control of an area of land by a single entrepreneur will have, in general, profound and characteristic modifying effects on both local landscape and ecology. No inhabited continent has failed to collect a stratum of company-induced patterns and structures, just as few non-communist countries have been able to avoid either the actuality or the social implications of American influence. This study is concerned not with the factory or farm which is solely a workplace for its employees, but with multi-purpose company-built structures in which workers may spend the greater part of each working year. The woru 'company' is used to refer to organizations run by both individuals and corporations. Two major types of company imprint on the landscape are the company town and company estate. These entities are not the means of production, but part of the infrastructure which makes production possible. SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS Private estates have existed in some form since man first began to cultivate the ground,