Metropolitics

Female Factory Strikes: Emancipatory Non-Mixity?

Ève Meuret-Campfort & translated by Oliver Waine — 2024-01-26T08:14:00Z

The division of industrial labor often places women workers in all-female factories and low-skilled jobs. Ève Meuret-Campfort examines how periods of strike action lead—or do not lead—these workers to politicize and claim this de facto segregation as an instrument of emancipation.
In the industrial working world, women workers often find themselves in de facto non-mixed situations, concentrated in highly feminized employment sectors such as clothing (Maruani and Meron 2012). As a result of

- From the Field / workers, non-mixity, factories, mobilization, women, manual workers, feminism, politicization

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

Mass-Producing the World's Factory

Stefan Al — 2015-02-09T05:50:00Z

The economic transformation of China into a global manufacturing mecca has emptied many rural areas, creating tens of thousands of migrant workers who float between their hometowns and the giant city-regions, where factory workers are in high demand. Stefan Al explores the architectural and town-planning aspects of this seismic shift, documenting factories, dormitories, “urban villages” and the lives of the individuals who populate them.
In 2008, when a British man discovered photos of what

- From the Field / China, migration, workers, factory towns, global supply chain, migrant workers

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