This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little-known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and places of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces.

"In her brilliant exploration of company towns from 1790 to 1925, Margaret Crawford has created the definitive book on this major topic in American economic and urban history, as well as a model of fine analytical writing about the politics of design. Her work reveals the potential of architectural history to illuminate the contested terrains of housing, urban design, and social life."

-Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and American Studies, Yale University

Margaret Crawford is Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She teaches courses in the history and theory of urban development, planning, and design, including: Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions; Listening to the City; Reality Check: Implementing Ideas in the Real World; and Temporary Urbanism. She has also taught the GSD studios: 101 Urban Salvations, and Nansha: Rethinking Urbanism and Landscape in the Pearl River Delta. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. Her book, Building the Workingman‘s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns, examines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environments. She edited The Car and the City:The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life and Everyday Urbanism, and has published numerous articles on issues in the American built environment. Crawford was previously Chair of the History, Theory and Humanities program at the Southern California Institute for Architecture. She has taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Florence, Italy. In Fall 2009, she will be a Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.