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In the Detroit row house that later became the headquarters of Hitsville USA, Berry Gordy was always scrambling and hustling to find musicians for the recording sessions he’d orchestrate in Motown’s tiny studio. In the early 1960s, a promising singer named Marvin Gaye sometimes filled in on drums. Smokey Robinson, another frequent collaborator, sang and also introduced Gordy to a talented childhood friend – a young woman named Diana Ross who belonged to a girl group called the Primettes. Several of those early Motown musicians – artists whose careers transformed pop music – knew one another socially, having grown up in the same working-class neighbourhood in Detroit.
‘We just went down and did everything,’ Gordy told Rolling Stone in 1990. ‘And we all knew how to work the machines. And everybody came and played at everybody’s session. The way that people could get into Motown was to get a job there and do something meaningful, and then they could come every day … Diana wanted to get a job at Motown so she could be there, but there was not really a job she could do. But I needed a secretary at the time, so I let her try that out.’ Ross manned a metal desk outside the studio door, as had Martha Reeves, who later fronted Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. ‘Ross,’ Gordy recalled, ‘worked for me for a summer, but she was so bad as a secretary that I had to let her go’ (Goldberg 1990). He signed her instead.
Like the families of most of those musicians, Gordy grew up in Detroit because his parents had joined the ‘great migration’ of African Americans who fled the violence and humiliations of the Jim Crow South to find work in northern industrial cities. In Detroit, automakers employed tens of thousands of blue-collar workers, many at Henry Ford’s gigantic factory in Dearborn, Michigan. After a tour of duty in Korea in 1952, Gordy, too, found work at a Lincoln-Mercury plant, but he gravitated toward music, his true passion. Motown, the empire he built, was an affectionate nickname for Detroit’s handle: Motor City.
Migration, of course, is never just about the destination. Gordy’s family came from Georgia, Ross’s from Virginia and Detroit. Reeves was born in Alabama and moved with her parents and siblings to Detroit when she was just an infant. The South’s history of slavery and then share-cropping was intimately connected to cotton, as well as the textile industry that had sprung up in places like Spartanburg, S.C.
But slavery was underwritten by consumers and businessmen located on the other side of the Atlantic. In England, Liverpool, London, and Bristol – all major ports – served as one vertex of the triangle of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade: cotton, tobacco, and sugar from the U.S. South and the Caribbean back to England, with the profits used to finance the kidnapping and brutal transport of hundreds of thousands of Africans to the plantations in the Americas. As of 1800, Liverpool merchants controlled 80 per cent of the British slave trade (Riding 2007).
Those port cities were home to powerful plantation owners, as well as the industries that served these trade corridors: shipbuilding, docklands construction, and, in London, financial services. The city had become a global capital of maritime insurance. As the command centre for the British Empire and home base for chartered colonial trading companies, London was not just a port of call, but a communications hub for shipping news. In fact, merchants in the late seventeenth century began congregating at a coffee house near the Tower of London, owned by a man named Edward Lloyd. ‘The place became a favourite haunt of ship’s captains, merchants and ship owners,’ according to an online history of maritime insurance. ‘At this time, there were more than 80 coffee houses within the City of London’s walls, each claimed its own specialization. By the 1730’s, Lloyd’s’ – which later evolved into Lloyd’s List and then Lloyd’s of London – ‘was emerging as the spot for marine underwriting by individuals’ (‘Corporate History’).
Assisted by shipping insurance, English traders imported huge volumes of American cotton to provide raw materials to the textile mills in Lancashire, a Midlands industrial region anchored by the City of Manchester and located not far from Liverpool. By the 1830s, writes urban historian Peter Hall, ‘Manchester was without challenge the first and greatest industrial city in the world,’ home to almost a quarter of all factory workers in Great Britain. Lancashire was traversed by fast-moving rivers and situated near the abundant coal fields of Sheffield. In Manchester, inventors and boot-strapping entrepreneurs developed and patented a series of weaving technologies that created an extraordinarily profitable industry responsible, at one time, for almost 10 per cent of the British economy.
As its textile mills grew larger and more complex, the Lancashire region attracted even more engineers and investors. ‘Manchester then became the main engineering centre in Britain, producing not only textile machinery, but water wheels, steam engines, boilers, railway locomotives, machine tools and a mass of engineering products,’ Hall explains (Hall 1998, 341).
In December 1842, a twenty-two-year-old arrived in the city with instructions from his father to learn the techniques of industrial management; the Engels family had investments in textile manufacturing. Yet over the next three years, Friedrich Engels spent much of his free time wandering through the crowded and dirty working-class slums that surrounded Manchester’s roaring factories. He discovered dingy back lanes, accessible only by narrow passageways. ‘[He] who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime the equal of which is not to be found – especially in the courts which lead down to the [River] Irk and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld,’ Engels wrote in his 1845 book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England.
During his explorations, Engels encountered stinking tanneries, privies without doors, and pools of urine and excrement. He coined a strong term for the indifference shown by capitalists, governments, and society in general: ‘social murder.’ Engels was also a keen observer of built form. He noticed that the city’s high streets were lined by well-tended, closely spaced shops – an urban plan that conveniently concealed the horrific conditions from the eyes of wealthy merchants. ‘I cannot help feeling that the liberal manufacturers, the “Big Wigs” of Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this sensitive method of construction’ (LeGates & Stout 1996, 50–51). He published his observations in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845 – twelve years after the British Parliament voted to ban the practice of slavery anywhere within its colonies. Engels’s book became a foundational text in what evolved into a program of radical social and economic reforms espoused by Engels and his friend Karl Marx.
The unspooling thread of Berry Gordy’s story, the antecedents of which trace all the way to the satanic mills of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, may also be spun forward in time, in equally unpredictable directions.
Engels’s commentary about Manchester can be seen as part of the literary headwaters for a genre of socially conscious writing, much of it highly influential, about living conditions for the urban working poor. The tradition extended through several of Charles Dickens’s later novels (Oliver Twist slightly predates Engels’s commentary) to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), as well as works by crusading journalists like Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives, an illustrated 1890 exposé on the slums in the Lower East Side, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), a documentary-style novel about grim working and sanitary conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Sinclair’s book caught the eye of politicians like Theodore Roosevelt and prompted sweeping reforms in the meat-processing industry.
Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the plight of the urban underclasses took on an increasingly critical role in the politics in many countries, prompting social reforms and radical cultural movements, and eventually the revolution that exploded on the wide streets of Saint Petersburg in March 1917. That uprising sparked others – in Hungary, Germany, and Austria – and inspired socialist movements elsewhere, such as the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.
The joyless grind of life for the working class, articulated by Engels and later Riis, also became the preoccupation of a generation of urban reformers and visionaries. They sought to redesign cities and buildings in ways that would produce cleaner, healthier, safer, and less overtly Dickensian living conditions. By the turn of the twentieth century, the progressivist tool kit included municipal parks, public schools, child care centres, proper sanitation, leafy suburbs suitable for families, transit services, libraries, and social supports for the poor, including purpose-built subsidized apartments featuring modern amenities, open spaces, and light.
One of the leading design voices to emerge from the radical politics of the post-WWI era was the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. During the 1920s, he proposed a set of radical changes in urban design and architecture, including the construction of soaring modernist apartments meant to provide housing designed to uplift and equalize the masses. His travels to New York City in the 1930s attracted rapt media attention, and his concept of building a ‘tower in a park’ in response to poverty and over-crowding in Paris found its way into the plans of American housing authorities and developers, perhaps most notably in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town (Eschner 2017).
As it happened, Diana Ross, in her teens, lived with her family in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass Housing Project – a very similar cluster of cruciform high-rises surrounded by open space and built in the 1930s. From afar, these apartment buildings looked like they had been designed by Le Corbusier himself. All have since been demolished.
In 1972, Berry Gordy moved his Motown label to Los Angeles, a showbiz city built by and for Southern California’s powerful real estate interests. Once served by North America’s largest network of electrified streetcars, L.A. in the 1970s had become the poster child for sprawl and congestion. (In the 1960s, the regional transit agency began pulling up the streetcar tracks in favour of buses, allegedly – though not in fact – at the behest of the auto industry.) Detroit had also slipped into a long decline, attributable to the destructive dual forces of L.A.-style sprawl and racial tension, as middle-class whites fled to the suburbs. In the city’s core, a dense network of expressways effectively choked off the downtown. Meanwhile, Detroit’s automakers were having their own problems, losing market share to the German manufacturers clustered around Munich and Hanover, as well as discount upstarts like Toyota and Datsun, based in Japan’s heavily urbanized south.
Over just a few decades, in fact, the technologies of sprawl – mass-produced tract housing, highway construction, and the combustion engine – altered the politics of cities, sparking new types of urban activism. Critics and grassroots groups in some places took aim at the legacy of top-down ‘urban renewal’ planning and the practice of block-busting working-class and racialized neighbourhoods. In other places, communities organized to fight and stop the highway construction schemes ripping through inner-city areas.
In more recent years, mounting evidence of climate crisis, spurred by fossil fuel consumption across a wide range of sectors, has pushed many cities to attempt to limit or at least slow sprawl by boosting densities, expanding rapid transit, and promoting other ways of reducing carbon. These include measures to incentivize green building technologies and renewable energy systems, some of which rely on smart city software and hardware.
There’s an ironic coda to this meandering urban saga. In the years before Henry Ford began mass-producing Model Ts, two other transportation technologies were in ascendancy: bicycles and electric trams. According to Frank Geels, a professor of systems innovation at the University of Manchester, ‘[they] helped to create many new elements that paved the way for the automobile, for example new mobility practices and user preferences, changing perception of the function of streets, becoming used to vehicles with higher speed, the Good Roads movement for smoother pavements, more power for public authorities in the administration of streets, development of new technical elements. Because of these socio-technical knock-on effects, the bicycle and electric tram acted as catalysts in the transition towards automobiles.’ As Geels observed in a 2005 paper, ‘The success of the automobile was enabled by the previous transformations.’
As of the 2020s, the failings of the automobile have forced many cities to revisit the role of bikes and electric trams, including the City of Angels. Today, the downtown L.A. intersection where Gordy had located Motown’s new head office, Sunset Boulevard and Argyle, is just a two-minute walk from a major underground transit station on one of the city’s newer LRT lines.
Gordy’s success and celebrity obviously sets him apart from the vast majority of North Americans of his generation. Yet in many ways, Gordy’s story exemplifies many features of the mass urbanization that started in earnest with the Industrial Revolution and now accounts for the way the majority of human beings live on this earth.
The city, as a form of human settlement, is an ancient invention. Through recorded history, cities evolved over centuries or even millennia from military outposts, safe harbours, trade route entrepots, oases, and pilgrimage sites. Some became imperial capitals or commercial centres but then disappeared due to disease, conquest, or natural disaster.
Unlike ancient and medieval cities, which generally grew slowly, industrial and then post-industrial cities rapidly exploded in size as upstart manufacturers and related service industries attracted entrepreneurs with capital and rivals and labour. That need for bodies – fed by the promise of money or an escape from the grinding poverty of rural subsistence farming – transformed cities into sites of migration and produced geographical ripple effects, such as the accelerated use of slave labour in colonized regions to produce the commodities that could be exported to those emergent cities.
The influx generated new forms of wealth, new forms of misery, and new sensibilities about class, social status, architecture, and power. As concentrated population centres, cities stoked the demand for consumer goods, gave rise to modern forms of finance and banking,1 and hastened the demise of the artisanal economy, which had its own legacy of strength through the powerful trade guilds that dominated urban commerce in the Middle Ages.
Indeed, it soon became apparent that cities were much more than just concentrations of human beings thrown together by the weird combinatorics of fate and history. They had evolved into complex ecosystems – hothouses for scientific and commercial innovation, political and social organization, and cultural activity. As Larry Busbea, a University of Arizona art historian and urban scholar, writes, ‘urban space came to be seen not as a neutral container but as a conductive medium for the movements and exchanges of people, information and objects,’ (Busbea 2012, 10).
Busbea quotes the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, author of The Urban Revolution: ‘The urban centre fills to saturation; it decays or explodes. From time to time, it reverses direction and surrounds itself with emptiness and scarcity. More often, it assumes and then proposes the concentration of everything there is in the world, in nature, in the cosmos: the fruits of the earth, the products of industry, human works, objects and instruments, acts and situations, signs and symbols.’
Scholars of urban history and sociology have shown how cities, under certain circumstances, ignited cultural movements and attracted inventors who changed the world. The American sociologist Paul Meadows further argued that urbanization has been powered by technological advancement. ‘Urbanization represents the processes by which urbanism emerges and develops out of the interaction of technology and society,’ he commented in a 1956 lecture.
In his 1998 treatise, Cities in Civilization, planning historian Peter Hall filled out the picture, looking at case studies involving certain cities at moments of pivotal innovation. He points out that Detroit, at the turn of the century, was ripe for the transportation revolution created by Henry Ford – a place on ‘the edge of the American heartland,’ where someone with risky ideas could spot opportunities that others had missed. Similarly, Hall writes, cities like Florence during the Renaissance, Berlin during the Weimar years, and Tokyo in the post-WWII era, flourished because of a concentration of creative people with ideas, investors with capital, and governments with ambition.
Still others regard cities as communications hubs or places where populist energy may be concentrated and then detonated. Cities can devolve into infectious disease accelerators, incubators of extremism, and zones of grotesque inequity. They are destroyed and rebuilt, expand and contract, liberate and oppress. Fully embracing these paradoxes of urban life, Lefebvre’s lyrical description rings true.
Yet the ever-evolving social and economic theories of the city – layered one on top of the other in a seemingly chaotic heap – rest on the sturdy foundation of the civil engineering and architectural technologies that have collectively produced the physical city. Many, in fact, are so ancient and universal that we barely acknowledge their presence, much less their relationships to the creation of the thoroughly urban, digitized world of the twenty-first century.
1. Many types of financial instruments predate industrialization, including bills of lading, credit or promissory notes, and trade in debt instruments. Merchant banking empires like the Medicis and the Rothschilds also emerged prior to the Industrial Revolution, sometimes helping to finance state actions, like wars. The first stock exchanges, early forms of property insurance, the widespread use of legal tender, and modern banking, however, date to the eighteenth century, and stoked the expansion of new industrial ventures and trade globalization.