Fordism and the City: How an Industry Shaped Urbanization in America

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, assemb...