Metropolitics

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-02-21T06:00:00Z

The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings the industrial towns of the pre-war era back to life—their smells, their health risks, but above all the lives of their inhabitants—offering today's readers a veritable ethnographic immersion into this working-class town.
Although today largely forgotten, except by historians of the working classes, Léon Bonneff was a major figure of social investigation in the early 20th century.

- Reviews / Aubervilliers, Paris, Greater Paris, France, Île-de-France, Paris region, industry, suburbs, banlieue, pollution, health, work, working classes, history, urban history, literature, environment, workers, blue-collar workers, manual workers

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-09-14T05:00:00Z

At the turn of the 20th century, the dramatically poor conditions of urban working-class housing was a cause of major concern in many cities, and would lead to the first social-housing experiments. Photography, then a booming new technology, was one of the means used to document this problem and raise awareness of conditions, as this book on working-class housing in Berlin illustrates.
Taking as their starting point a collection of photographs taken during the first 20 years of the 20th

- Reviews / housing, urban history, social housing, slum, Berlin, Germany, history, affordable housing, photography, working classes, blue-collar workers, manual workers, workers

Who Stays and Who Leaves? Residential Flows in French Shrinking Cities

Mathilde Rudolph — 2017-11-01T06:00:00Z

In focusing on residential flows, Mathilde Rudolph seeks to shed light on the processes of urban decline at play in France. She emphasizes how these flows are socially selected and ultimately entrench differences in social composition between shrinking cities and growing cities, as executives appear to avoid shrinking cities while manual workers are more prone to stay.
---- Series: Shrinking Cities With the growing literature on the subject of shrinking cities, it has become easier to gain a

- From the Field / France, residential mobility, deindustrialization, blue-collar workers, manual workers, shrinking cities, urban decline, urban shrinkage, degrowth, shrinkage, executives

Reskilling Urban Manufacturing: Workforce Solutions from the Inside Out

Nichola Lowe — 2015-12-15T15:59:35Z

In the United States, a four-year college education has gradually come to be assumed as a prerequisite for entry into the middle class. This is troubling, as more than half the country's working-age population lacks this credential. Rather than being driven exclusively by a “college for all” mentality, argues Nichola Lowe, policymakers should strive for an economy in which social-mobility strategies are also embedded in the workplace, activating internal structures within firms that support and

- Debates / United States, work, public policy, industry, blue-collar workers, education, manufacturing, skills, training

The world of the blue-collar worker: changed, but not gone

2014-02-19T05:50:00Z

Despite deindustrialisation and increasingly acute economic difficulties in the former strongholds of heavy industry, manual workers remain a key group in French society. The photographs and text presented here describe the ways in which their work has changed, together with the reconfigurations both of manual workers as a group and the regions in which they live and work – and how these transformations have weakened them politically.
Manual workers played a central role in shaping and

- From the Field / inequalities, deindustrialization, work, crisis, photography, Le Bar Floréal, working classes, industry, blue-collar workers, manual workers, workers, mobilization