Beyond the Factory Gates: Detroit and the Aesthetics of Fordism, 1903-1941

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which the new mode of industrial organization associating mass production with mass consumption in the early twentieth century--what we call Fordism--had profound cultural repercussions on urban spatial practices. I address Fordism as a mode of socialization that deployed industrial techniques to reconstitute the very nature of social relations. This attempt at broad socialization through technological means reflected a type of technical thought coalescing in the industrial practices of the early twentieth century that both brought spatial practices into its service and radically altered existing social relations. As such, Fordist ideas formulated to address efficiency in industrial production extended to the city, its architecture, and its inhabitants, construing them as technological artifacts subject to the same economies of scope and scale, and requirements of production and consumption as the manufacture of automobiles, demonstrating that Fordist modes of production permeated not just manufacturing processes but also the organization of management structures, the architectural layout of factories and offices, the social spaces of the city, and popular conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and the body.