Work, Life and Leisure

Work, Life and Leisure

®        In 1880, Durgacharan Ray wrote a novel, Debganer Martye Aagaman (The Gods Visit Earth).

®        Brahma along with rain god Varuna visit the capital of British India- Calcutta.

Historical processes which shaped the modern cities

            (1) the rise of industrial capitalism

            (2) the establishment of colonial rule over large parts of the world

            (3) the development of democratic ideals.

Ancient cities

®        Ur, Nippur (Mesopotamia i.e modern Iraq) – along river Tigris and EuphratesMohenjodaro, Harappa (Indus Valley Civilization) – along river Indus

®        Towns and cities first appeared along river valleys.

®        Ancient cities could develop:

Reason

®        An increase in food supplies made it possible to support a wide range of non-food producers of cities.

Earliest industrial cities of Britain                                             

®        Leeds and Manchester – textile centers

Modern city of London

®        London was the largest city in the world, and an imperial centre in the nineteenth century situated at the banks of river Thames.

®        1750 – population of London - 675,000

®        1880 ­- population of London – 4 million

            Reasons:

            Employment on dockyard, clothing and footwear, wood and furniture, metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision products such as surgical instruments, watches.

Problem of crime in London

®        As London grew, crime flourished. Around 20,000 criminals were living in London in the 1870s.

®        Henry Mayhew compiled long lists of those who made a living from crime.

            The police were worried about law and order, philanthropists (Someone who works for social upliftment and charity) were anxious about public morality.

®        Andrew Mearns, a clergyman who wrote The Bitter Cry of Outcast London in the 1880s, showed why crime was more profitable than labouring in small underpaid factories.

            Steps taken:

            (1) authorities imposed high penalties for crime.

            (2) offered work to those who were considered the ‘deserving poor’.

            (3) To take out children from criminal activities Compulsory Elementary Education Act was introduced in 1870.

            (3) Factory Act 1902- Childerns kept out of industrial work

Problem of Housing

®        After Industrial Revolution in England, London became a magnet for rural people who search for job. Landowners constructed Tenements for new arrival.

®        Tenement – Run-down and often overcrowded apartment house, especially in a poor section of a large city

®        In 1887,Charles Booth, a Liverpool ship-owner, conducted the first social survey of low skilled London workers in the East End of London.

            Report:

®        1 million Londoners were very poor and were expected to live only up to an average age of 29 .Life expectancy among the gentry and the middle class was 55.

®        London, he concluded ‘needed the rebuilding of at least 400,000 rooms to house its poorest citizens’.

Need of Housing

            The better-off city dwellers continued to demand that slums simply be cleared away.

Reasons:

            (1) First the poor were seen as a serious threat to public health: they were overcrowded, badly ventilated, and lacked sanitation. There was a fear of epidemic.

            (2) Second, there were worries about fire hazards created by poor housing.

            (3) Third, there was a widespread fear of social disorder, especially after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The poor can rebel.

Steps to clear London:

            (1) Green the open space between city and suburbs.

            (2) Attempts made to reduce pollution

            (3) Large blocks of apartments were built similar to New York and Berlin.

            (4) Rent control was introduced in Britain during the First World War

Garden city

®        Architect and planner Ebenezer Howard developed the principle of the Garden City, a pleasant space full of plants and trees

®        Following Howard’s ideas Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker designed the garden city ofNew Earswick.

Transport in London

®        To persuade people to live in garden suburbs of London a transport network needed. The London underground railway partially solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city.

®        The very first section of the Underground in the world opened on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street in London.

®        By 1880 the expanded train service was carrying 40 million passengers a year.

Problems:

            (1) Charles Dickens wrote in Dombey and Son (1848) about the massive destruction in the process of construction. To make approximately two miles of railway, 900 houses had to be destroyed.

            (2) asphyxiation (Suffocation due to lack of oxygen supply) and heat.

Bloody Sunday of November 1887

®         In 1887, 10,000 strong crowed (London Poor) marched from Deptford to London, it was dispersed by police.

®         London poor exploded in a riot, demanding relief from the terrible conditions of poverty, it was brutally suppressed by the police. From this example it is clear that large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the city. A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity.

®         In 1889 London dockyard workers went on strike.

Haussmanisation of Paris

®        In 1852, Louis Napoleon III (a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) crowned himself emperor. After taking over, he undertook the rebuilding of Paris. The chief architect of the new Paris was Baron Haussmann.

®        The poor were evicted from the centre of Paris to reduce the possibility of political rebellion and to beautify the city. This reconstruction displaced up to 350,000 people from the centre of Paris.

®        Paris is situated on the banks of river Seine.

The City in Colonial India

®        The pace of urbanisation in India was slow under colonial rule.

®        In the early twentieth century, no more than 11 per cent of Indians were living in cities.

®        Most urban dwellers were living in Presidency cities – The capitals of the Bombay, Bengal and Madras Presidencies in British India

Bombay: The Prime City of India

®        In the seventeenth century, Bombay was a group of seven islands under Portuguese control.

®        In 1661, control of the islands passed into British hands after the marriage of Britain’s King Charles II to the Portuguese princess. East India Company shifted its trading base from Surat to Bombay.

®        Bombay became the capital of the Bombay Presidency in 1819, after the Maratha defeat in the Anglo-Maratha war.

®        The first cotton textile mill in Bombay was established in 1854.Large number of people migrated in Bombay to do work in mills.

Problem of housing

®        While every Londoner in the 1840s enjoyed an average space of 155 square yards, Bombay had a mere 9.5 square yards. With the rapid and unplanned expansion of the city, the crisis of housing and water supply became acute by the mid-1850s.

®        More than 70 per cent of the working people lived in the thickly populated chawls of Bombay

®        Chawls were multi-storeyed structures which were divided into smaller one-room tenements which had no private toilets. Water was scarce, and people often quarrelled every morning for a turn at the tap. The homes being small, streets and neighbourhoods were used for a variety of activities such as cooking, washing and sleeping.

®        People who belonged to the ‘depressed classes’ found it even more difficult to find housing in chawls.

®        Town planning in Bombay came about as a result of fears about the plague epidemic.

®        The City of Bombay Improvement Trust was established in 1898; it focused on clearing poorer homes out of the city centre. By 1918, Trust schemes had deprived 64,000 people of their homes, but only 14,000 were rehoused.

®        In 1918, a Rent Act was passed to keep rents reasonable,

Land Reclaimation

®        The Bombay governor William Hornby approved the building of the great sea wall which prevented the flooding of the low-lying areas of Bombay in 1784.

®        In 1864, the Back Bay Reclamation Company won the right to reclaim the western foreshore from the tip of Malabar Hill to the end of Colaba.

®        Marine Drive a familiar landmark of Bombay, it was built on land reclaimed from the sea in the twentieth century.

Bombay as the City of Dreams: The World of Cinema

®        Bombay appears to many as a ‘mayapuri’ – a city of dreams.

®        Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar shot a scene of a wrestling match in Bombay’s Hanging Gardens and it became India’s first movie in 1896.

®        Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra (1913).

®        By 1987, the film industry employed 520,000 people.

Note:

®        The factory acts 1902, introduced in London that children were kept out of industrial work.

®        In 19th century Chartism (a movement demanding the vote for all adult males) and the 10-hour movement (limiting hours of work in factories), mobilized large numbers of men in England.

®        Singapore city became an independent nation in 1965 under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, President of the People’s Action Party. Today, most of us know Singapore as a successful, rich, and well planned city.

®        Temperance movement – A largely middleclass- led social reform movement which emerged in Britain and America from the nineteenth century onwards. It identified alcoholism as the cause of the ruin of families and society, and aimed at reducing the consumption of alcoholic drinks particularly amongst the working classes.

Cities and the challenge to environment

®  In nineteenth century England, industrial cities such as Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, hundreds of factory chimneys emitted large quantity of black smoke into the skies.

®  Smoke was not easy to monitor or measure, and owners got away with small adjustments to their machinery that did nothing to stop the smoke. Moreover, the Smoke Abatement Acts of 1847 and 1853, as they were called, did not always work to clear the air.

® Calcutta too had a long history of air pollution. In 1863, Calcutta became the first Indian city to

get smoke nuisance legislation.