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An American Symbol: The Significance of Factory Spaces in American Cities

Juliette Gale

Clark University
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In our course, we have been discussing what an American city really is, both as a

physical space and social institution. Through our course texts we have seen that American cities

are spaces of produced knowledge, surveillance, technology, occupation, inclusion and

exclusion. As a result of produced knowledge, the symbol of an American city is full of

contradicting views. In one way, cities can be viewed as global economic and technological

intersections full of opportunity and optimism (Le Corbusier,1937; Sassen,2001). Cities can also

be seen as spaces that are unsafe, and susceptible to crime (Kelling & Wilson, 1982; Jackson,

1985; Wirth, 1927). Additionally, they can be viewed as spaces of injustice, surveillance, and

mobilization (Shah, 2001; Chauncy, 1994; Patillo, 2007; Zukin, 1982; Smith, 1996; Miller &

Gibbons, 2009), along with multiple other discourses we were not able to touch on within the

course. These narratives do not exist in separate planes or spheres, they all exist simultaneously

and are reproduced to create a national understanding to what an American city is.

One of the physical symbols in an American city is the factory. Factories that remain in

urban spaces, both in use and abandoned, remind those who look at the structures of a time in

American history where American industry was focused on the production of material goods.

However, many of these factories in urban spaces no longer serve that purpose. Worcester is full

of these factory spaces, once being a major manufacturing center in New England during the

Industrial Revolution. Worcester was home to the production of many iron and steel products,

clothing, machinery, and later into the 20th century, plastics. As the American economy started to

shift away from manufacturing to more consumer and service based industries, however, many

Worcester factories went out of business or relocated, leaving behind many of factory buildings

around the city today. Some of these spaces have stayed abandoned, some have been repurposed

for small manufacturing or office spaces, others for retail, and some have been converted to
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apartments. No matter how these spaces are transformed, factory spaces are a physical

representation, and continuous reminder, of the shifting ideologies of the role and purpose of an

American city.

These urban factories, like the Royal Worcester Corset Factory or Crompton & Knowles

Loom works pictured, were promoted as spaces of technological innovation and economic

success. The productivity of these factories contributed to the produced knowledge of the role of

urban spaces as economic centers. This idea works with other expectations, like Le Corbusier

(1937) states in New York is not a Completed City, that, A fundamental condition of health

of a city is being traversed, irrigated, nourished from end to end, being free! (p. 103).

Perceptions like these associate the ideas of freedom to cities, in both a physical and economic

sense. Even though there were optimistic and positive portrayals of factories and urbanization in

the American psyche in the 19th century, factories were also spaces of inequity and exploitation.

As exemplified through Kara Walkers piece A Subtlety, that was on display in the Domino

Sugar Factory in New York City, American factory spaces were intersections of power, bodies,

race, gender, wealth inequality, and consumption. Factory spaces, included those in Worcester,

contributed to the knowledge produced about American cities being spaces of economic centers.

The role of urban factory spaces in the national knowledge production of American cities

has shifted in the 20th and 21st centuries. As many of these spaces are either abandoned or

transformed into living or retail spaces, they send a message that the expectation of an American

city is not what it was in the 19th century. The factory spaces that I have focused on, The Royal

Worcester Corset Factory and Cropton & Knowles Loom Works, have undergone the same

process of transformation into residential spaces as many American factories. As Sharon Zukin

(1982) explains in her work Loft Living, The residential conversion of manufacturing lofts
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confirms and symbolizes the death of an urban manufacturing center (p. 3). These spaces can no

longer be used for economic production. Zukin (1982) goes on to explain:

the residential conversion of manufacturing space sets the stage for the definitive end

of traditional industrial activityThus the most fundamental part of a mode of

productionthe space where products are actually producedis shifted to another

useAs housing, the former factory space provides for the reproduction of the labor

force. (p. 19)

This labor force is primarily professionals, academics, and service industry employees, marking

the shifting of expectations of urban space from being one of manufacturing, to a space of

consumption, service, and living. The composition of people who occupy these spaces reflect the

20th and 21st century expectation that American cities are to be globally connected through

technology and have global, service based industries.

The Royal Worcester apartments and Loomworks apartments, in addition to being

representative in shifting economic expectations, reproduce ideas that cities are spaces of

surveillance and policing. As seen pictured, there are video monitored security systems, and

street lights present around the apartment buildings. Surveillance and community monitoring is

not a new aspect to American cities. As exemplified by Shah (2001), communities have been

historically surveyed and monitored in order to create and perpetuate racialized understandings

of people in relation to space, and to provide justification to act upon these racialized

understandings under the guise of public health and safety. The imagery surrounding the Royal

Worcester apartments and Loomworks apartments, in addition to the neighboring Astro Factory,

also recalls imagery created by Wilson and Kelling (1982) in their Atlantic piece Broken

Windows. In their piece, they argue that the physical deterioration of space is a starting point
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for crime and disorder. They propose the solution to this is to increase police presence, and

community surveillance to manage sources of social disorder (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).

Although their broken windows theory places blame on individuals and communities for urban

decay rather than the social systems and economic conditions, this notion of surveillance and

security is deeply ingrained in what is expected out of an American city.

Factory spaces are symbolic structures of economic transition of urban spaces from sites

of manufacturing and processing, to sites of communications, service, and consumption. This

transition of the type of industry dominant in cities also changes the expectations of who should

be able to participate in urban spaces. Even though they are spaces symbolic of change, factories

are representative of the continued understanding of cities as centers of technological innovation

and industry. As well as being symbolic structures of the economic role of an American city, the

contemporary use of factory spaces as residential spaces perpetuate understandings of social

order and community surveillance. These spaces, as physical symbols in urban spaces, serve

roles in actively producing knowledge to contribute to the various, defined and redefined

expectations of what an American city is.

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References

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Miller, F., & Gibbons, D. (2009). The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First

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