Industrialization And Urbanization

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Industrial revolution, in the 19th century, revolutionized the economy and the lifestyle of America. It had many more effects, including the urbanization in the United States. Statistics show that from 1820 to 1920, the number of cities in the USA rose from 61 to 2722. Likewise, the urban population increased many times too. Industrialization also changed the production techniques by the extensive use of division of labor to divide simplified tasks among specialized labor. Urbanization and division of labor are highly correlated, and division of labor crucially aided the urbanization of the United States of America.
Industrialization in the USA took place in two significant phases. The first phase was between 1820 and 1840 when rural artisanal …show more content…

Before industrialization, self-employed craftsmen and artisans made the entire product using hand tools and the skills they had acquired before. However, with division of labor, during industrialization, “factory owners recruited workers for a wage in the labor market and reduced their jobs into a myriad of tasks” (Kim, “Division of labor and the rise of cities”484). Most of these jobs were obtained through a network of family, friends, and people of similar ethnicity, so job searching costs in the cities were much lower as the cities had a higher concentration of workers and firms because cities had factories with more division of labor. This signifies the importance of division of labor and industrialization in the urbanization of …show more content…

From a small compressed urban area with less than 100,000 people in 1850, Pittsburgh had more than a million inhabitants in 1907 (Muller 58). After 1870, a remarkable growth in manufacturing and division of labor under corporate capitalism extended the industries beyond the city limits of Pittsburgh, increasing both, the size and the population of the city. There was a significant increase in the capital intensive and mass-producing factories of steel, glass, and electrical industry. All these industries used division of labor to increase their productivities, so it can be said that division of labor backed the urbanization of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, and in general, all around the

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