Fordism and the City

How an Industry Shaped Urbanization in America

Jay Cephas

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822992301
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: History

In the early twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company built an industrial empire with massive factory complexes and associated infrastructures. Henry Ford's 1915 plan to decentralize industrial manufacturing relied on moving key technical processes closer to sites of resource extraction while distributing elements of production. In Fordism and the City, Jay Cephas analyzes key infrastructures—from factories and mills to roads, rail lines, and canals—to trace the impact of automated, assembly-line production on the urban and rural landscapes of Michigan. The overwhelming scale of the Ford Motor Company's plant in Dearborn, the idyllic setting of its small village factories throughout the Rouge River corridor, and the remoteness of the company's iron ore mines and hardwood forests in the Upper Peninsula all played an important role. Under the rubric of "the industrial city," Fordism sought to replace conventional urbanism, reconfiguring factory production and then making its practices visible and intelligible to a consuming public through an industrial aesthetic. In doing so, Cephas shows, Fordism functioned as a normalizing force that helped to usher in the new industrial society.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Defining Fordism through Urbanization
• 1. Fordist Cultures of Production and the Factory-City
• 2. “One Foot on the Farm and the Other Foot in the Factory”: Industrial Ruralism, Decentralization, and the Moral Geographies of Extended Urbanization
• 3. Moving Things
• 4. “The Body Is Like an Automobile Chassis”: Industrialized Medicine and Administrative Order in Detroit’s New Center
• 5. Between Head and Hand: Crafting an Aesthetic of the Industrial Working Class
• 6. The Ford World
• Epilogue: Cities without Urbanization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover Page