Corporate Urbanism: The Past, Present, and Future of Company Towns and Public Space Governance

Corporate investments in building and managing towns around the production sites could be considered one of the biggest legacies of the Industrial Revolution for shaping productive habitats, and company towns are one of the most accomplished forms of this trend. Reaching their zenith during the 19th and 20th centuries and often adhering to utopian, paternalistic, and colonialist models, this model has resurfaced today in various, albeit more intricate, sophisticated, and inconspicuous manifestations, maintaining the centrality of corporate welfare as the strategy around which to shape the urban spaces. The presentation will explore how company towns ownership, biopower, and governance have shaped their public space usage. The case of Dalmine in Italy, a company town with a century-long association with a giant multinational steel pipe manufacturing, will illustrate the transition from total corporate dominance to more democratic public space governance. This transition has engendered novel forms of public spaces, representing a nuanced private-public interplay. Despite this shift, the company's influence remains tangible and decisive in shaping its urban fabric and industrial heritage. Parallelly, the presentation will explore emerging forms of company towns and their privately managed public spaces, offering insights into the potential future trajectories of these corporate urban domains. About the conference: Buildings and the public urban space have a close relationship and shape each other. The interdisciplinary conference Eternal buildings in future cities will explore this relationship. On the one hand, it is dedicated to the question of how houses will have to be designed, planned, and built in the future to be used and maintained as long as possible. On the other hand, it focuses on the public space in the constantly changing urban and social fabric. What kind of urbanism and architecture allows people to build a relation with their neighborhood and their city? Our Western building culture has always been characterized by the principle of durability of materials and constructions. Houses should be constructed to be durable and as low-maintenance as possible. At the same time, houses that are continuously maintained and cared for can of course be durable despite the use of impermanent materials. The prevailing trend in large parts of Europe to demolish buildings prematurely and replace them with new buildings shows that the useful life of a house is not only determined by the life of its components alone, but by a wide variety of aspects – beyond materiality and construction. As part of the real estate economy and land price policy, for example, houses are subject to developments that are only influenced to a limited extent or not at all by their material value. However, at stake are also functionality (polyvalence and redundancy of spaces), user/ownership (who uses a house, who owns it?), the adaptability and reparability of houses as well as legal framework conditions and norms. The conference presents five panels to discuss challenges and potentials of today’s building culture in (future) cities, from the maintenance, preservation, durability, and adaptability of building constructions to social questions regarding the urban space and housing.