In the shadow of the refinery: an American oil company town on the Caribbean island of Aruba

American industries created company towns across the United States, and in the late nineteenth century, their usage spread into Latin America and the Caribbean. Most company towns were designed for workers; the literature on company towns has tended to focus on these. However, some were specifically designed for expatriate managers and supervisors; these have received relatively little scholarly attention. This article focuses on Standard Oil’s Lago Colony on the island of Aruba. Established in 1929, the community offered a host of amenities including schools, a hospital, a store, a club, and a wide variety of sporting venues. This article examines the evolution of the town and explores the factors that contributed to its decline. It discusses life in the community, and specifically focuses on the lived experiences of children in making the company town their home.     

The Paradox of a Capitalist Utopia: Visionary Ideals and Lived Experience in the Pullman Community 1880–1900

The model company town of Pullman was a social experiment that took utopian principles of intentional community and directed them towards a perfection of the capitalist system in America. This paternalistic effort on the part of industrialist George Pullman is well known as a social experiment that failed on a grand scale, as the model town became the site of a major labor action in 1894. This study uses archaeology and history to suggest that the town of Pullman was not simply an idealized community that served as a backdrop to a major labor action, but instead that the town actually created circumstances that elevated worker discontent that perhaps made workers more prone to take action against the company.     

Multi-Firm City Versus Company Town: A Micro Foundation Model of Localization Economies

When do we have a company town and when do we have a multi‐firm city? In this paper I analyze the impact of public infrastructure investment decisions on types of cities in a decentralized urban system. This is done in a one‐sector spatial general equilibrium model of a closed economy. Investment in public infrastructures reduces the fixed set up cost of all firms within the city resulting in multi‐firm cities. Thus, in this approach localization economies are modelled explicitly instead of assuming that larger industrial size within the city enhances productivity. On the other hand, when the infrastructure is not provided, a company town will be formed by a developer because of the fixed cost required by each firm. The decision of whether to invest in the provision of public infrastructures depends on the type of city that will provide households with the highest utility. This paper characterizes the conditions that lead to each of the two equilibrium configurations.     

The Alcester Waterworks Company: A Study in the Small-scale Technology of Water Supply

Abstract

The Alcester Waterworks Company supplied a small town in Warwickshire with water from 1879 until 1947. Always a miniscule concern, the company used very simple technology throughout its existence. The introduction of a gas engine as a replacement for a waterwheel as a source of power for pumping produced a reduction in pumping expenses which transformed the company's financial affairs. The surviving remains of the company's installations give a picture of the simple technology used and allow some tentative conclusions to be made about the causes of the difficulties with pumping which the company experienced in its early days.     

里耶“户籍简”与战国末期的基层社会

里耶户籍简当为秦人侵吞楚国青阳以西之地后的产物,其编录年代或可定为战国末叶。户籍简中的南阳,为迁陵里邑之名,其上级行政单位或为设置在迁陵之都乡。南阳里大致有编户民20余户,涉及姓氏多达七八个,呈异姓杂居之状。编户民的家庭类型有核心家庭、主干家庭和联合家庭三类,但以前两者为主,联合家庭只是个别现象,大致可视为一种暂时性的过渡形态或贫困及其他原因导致的个例。家庭奴仆乃编户民的附属人口,他们与主家的人身隶属关系已得到法律的承认,而女性奴仆则可以通过婚姻或生育达到提高社会与家庭地位的目的。这些与基层社会形态相关的诸多特征,可以看成战国末期楚、秦两国基层社会的共性之所在。里中居民行编伍之制,但这可能属于秦文化因素,非荆楚旧有。     

Geographies of adult multigenerational family households in metropolitan Sydney

This paper investigates spatial trends of multigenerational adult families in metropolitan Sydney. Australia's immigrant gateway city, Sydney has high housing costs and infrastructure pressures, and planning policies support higher residential densities. In this context, the accommodation of persons living in multigenerational families is examined, by major region of origin, their geographies in Sydney, and by housing costs and constraints. Results highlight that cultural origins were influential in multigenerational household formations, and such formation is higher in areas of first and second ethnic community formation areas. Multigenerational living is also more common in middle ring and outer areas of cheaper housing. Implications are drawn for more nuanced housing policies in Sydney and comparable cities, given that detached and semi‐detached houses were favoured by these households, whereas two‐fifths of new housing constructed in Sydney in 2011 consists of two or less bedroom apartments.     

Building a New Jerusalem: The Meaning of a Group of Merchant Houses in Seventeenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne, England

The political and religious symbolism of buildings is of enduring interest in historical archaeology. Similarly, ideal concepts in urban planning, and utopian communities have been of recent concern. This paper moves beyond iconography and ideology to examine how a new, post-Civil War English elite tried to implement a policy of reforming their town as a New Jerusalem. A group of merchant houses reveals an attempt to build Scripture into the physical environment, and establish the elite as Elect “watchmen” over the lives and souls of the townspeople. Contemporary sermons are integral to the analysis, as are the agency and inter-relationships of a tightly-knit social group.     

The Heritage of an Empty Land: Independence Valley,Nevada

Although emigrants, railroaders, cowboys and shepherds passed through northeastern Nevada's Independence Valley in the 19th century, colonization did not begin until the early 1900s when dozens of homesteader families occupied claims. Soon, parts of this drab basin contained houses, barns, fences, occasional irrigation ditches and fields of dry farmed grain and alfalfa. Plans were made to convert a solitary railroad section camp into a market town and to connect it via a spur track with a group of nearby mines. But drought and jack-rabbit invasions stifled the homesteaders, while the mining operations were squelched by the onset of the Great Depression. Today, Independence Valley is uninhabited, but its sunbaked flats still contain numerous homestead remnants, abandoned fields, section line roads and the section camp's ruins, which form a distinctive landscape mosaic that characterizes many parts of the Great Basin.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

The Ossett Mill Company

Abstract

The history of Joint-Stock Company Woollen Mills exhibits a singular instance of energy amongst the smaller capitalists of the manufacturing districts…. the clothiers of certain country districts, such as Farsley, Idle, Eccleshill, Batley, Dewsbury, etc, put their heads together, and subsequently their purses…by erecting mills at home, to scribble their own wool and full their own cloth …. In the formation of a company mill a number of clothiers (for they must be clothiers to be partners) of small capital meet together and determine to become a company of so many partners, from ten to fifty, in shares generally of £25 each, each person taking as many shares as his capital will enable him…. With this subscribed capital deeds of partnership are drawn, land is bought, a mill erected, and machinery put up …. The processes which are carried on in these company mills are scribbling, carding, slubbing, and fulling cloth, which are the preparatory processes of the cloth manufacture, and the remaining processes—viz, spinning, warping, weaving, and burling—are done at home by members of the family or by persons employed for that purpose.     

The public life of the Swahili stonehouse, 14th–15th centuries AD

Houses are an important subject of archaeological research, normally explored through the households they contain. This has established a deliberately social agenda for the archaeology of houses, yet has had the unintended consequence of creating bounded worlds for study. Although household archaeologies explore the ways that households contributed to broader social and economic realms, it is rare to think through the public role of houses for non-residents and the larger population of the settlement. This paper seeks to explore this more public aspect of houses using the data from archaeology at Songo Mnara, a 14th–15th century Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. This was a time when stone-built domestic architecture was first emerging in this region. The archaeology of the houses provides data for a series of ways that the house was at the heart of the economic and political life of the town, as well as demonstrating a spatial continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces. It is therefore suggested that the domestic and residential functions of the house for a particular household should be balanced with an appreciation of the broader world of the house itself.     

跨地区生计视角下流动人口在流出地住房投资行为的时空特征

基于流动人口流入地福建省的问卷调查数据与流出地河南、安徽两省的调研资料,采用生存分析方法、空间可视化与质性研究方法,探讨流动人口在流出地住房投资行为的时空特征和规律。研究发现：流动人口在流出地村庄内建房或在县城（镇）内购房是一较为普遍的现象,建房率明显大于购房率,且存在较为明显的住房闲置现象;在时间特征上,2005年以前的住房投资行为较少,而2005年以来渐多,购房比建房需经历更长的时间跨度,特定时期内的住房政策能推动流出地的住房投资行为;在空间特征上,流出地的住房投资行为存在区位优化选择倾向,且建房的跨地区生计走廊数量多于购房。最后,基于上述的研究结论,提出相关政策启示。     

Twentieth Century Revival Architecture and The Gentry

This case study focuses on the 20th century revival houses of a Midwestern University city, Urbana, Illinois. English Revival houses are most closely associated with faculty families viewed as constituting a “gentry class” housed in a traditional “faculty row.” Other people (businessmen, managers, operatives and self-employed professionals) have occupied the Colonial Revival and Dutch Colonial houses and Cape Cod cottages. Initially, the Early American style (the Colonial Revival diluted for use on ranch houses) was employed by developers and builders to house lower-middle class families in the new subdivisions of the 1960s. The occurrence of various style houses in Urbana is compared with national architectural trends as reflected in a leading builders' magazine.     

Modifying sense of place in a federal company town: Sunflower Village,Kansas, 1942 to 1959

The federal government built Sunflower Village, Kansas, to house employees of the Sunflower Ordnance Plant and their families during World War II. The community existed in this fashion until 1959 when a private real-estate developer bought the land and buildings. The Village evolved out of many perspectives in urban planning including those of federal ownership, ‘Garden City’ communities, and private company towns. This study examines a modified, or unique, development of sense of place that evolved here due to these varied urban forms and despite evidence of mobility and a short residence. Landscape analysis, archival searches and personal interviews also reveal a distinct difference in the experiences of youth and adults that resulted in varying processes of attachment within the community.     

Sect and House in Syria: History,Architecture, and Bayt Amongst the Druze in Jaramana

This paper explores the connections between the architecture and materiality of houses and the social idiom of bayt (house, family). The ethnographic exploration is located in the Druze village of Jaramana, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus. It traces the histories, genealogies, and politics of two families, bayt Abud-Haddad and bayt Ouward, through their houses. By exploring the two families and the architecture of their houses, this paper provides a detailed ethnographic account of historical change in modern Syria, internal diversity, and stratification within the intimate social fabric of the Druze neighbourhood at a time of war, and contributes a relational approach to the anthropological understanding of houses.     

The changing place of condominiums across a metropolitan area, 1970–2015

By definition, all condominiums share social features and challenges of governance, but they have inspired two separate narratives: as suburban, often gated, communities and as downtown high-rises or conversions. In Canada, as elsewhere, research has focused on large urban areas, neglecting subtly different dynamics in smaller centres. The purpose of this case study of mid-sized Hamilton, Ontario, was to assess whether and how those dynamics are different across a whole metro area, using newspapers and building permit data. It tracks the changing place of condo developments and conversions across Hamilton since 1970. For decades, most developments were suburban town (row) houses; since 2000, downtown revival has included conversions and taller, new-build projects. It argues that early developments and conversions reflected a “value gap” in relation to purpose-built rental apartments. Led by a migrant arts community, recent centralization has exploited an inner-city “rent gap,” coupled with a popular reassessment of urban living.     

Preliminary report on fish remains from the 18th- and 19th-century pearl fishing and trading settlement of Al Zubārah,Qatar

This paper presents initial results of continuing work on the fish remains from excavations at Al Zubārah in northwest Qatar. Al Zubārah flourished as a political, cultural and economic hub during the 18th and 19th centuries following the establishment of a settlement by the ?Utūb tribe from Kuwait. Comparison is made between faunal material from contexts dating to the initial settlement of the site in the mid 18th century and occupation deposits from houses inhabited once the town was at the height of its importance as a trading centre. This allows comparison of fishing strategies employed as the town expanded, cultural changes in the preference of fish and the effects on the marine environment as the town's population grew. Analysis also examines evidence for the preparation of fish within the houses and cooking practices.