Revisiting Engles' "The Great Towns"

I am, admittedly, one of so many designers who come from a rural, conservative background who entered university staunchly protecting the right-leaning ideologies that were passed down to me from my father who had a real crisis of identity when I began to read and learn independently. Once I put the ideologies of the rural capitalist against the learned communist, I have certainly shifted my views to align much more closely with the latter over the last six years. This is one of the reasons that when being handed some Engels to read on day one of a community planning class, I knew right away that I was going to align right along with the ideologies of the class, and became excited to see what could come out of this framing every week. It is hard to learn about the communities that we will design for and still tout the ideologies of "rugged individualism" and "capitalism above all else". These ideologies do little to serve the average man, woman, and child in this country, and worse, lead to exploitation globally. Ford's pushing of the car and the suburb is one example of how this has destroyed our sense of community within this country with us all being expected to never use public transit and set up our private household in our three-bedroom suburban ranch.   Due to that, I am revisiting "The Great Towns" at the end of the semester with all other subjects discussed in class to draw from. Engels's writings about the city and capitalism's tolls taken upon it are still as valuable today as it was when it was written. We may not truly have slum cities anymore, but our cities are still dying in their own way.

Engels context was one of a newly and quickly industrialized England. Specifically London. Within this city, there was a boom in the need to facilitate Cheap housing for immigrants and new industrial workers who flocked to the city. This created predatory landlords and conditions for the tenets to live in abject squalor. Living with pigs and livestock was one condition noted that sent me over the proverbial top. This was inevitable, from the perspective of Engels of which I agree, that capitalism and its consequence was the inherent and parental cause of these predatory conditions within the newly extreme wealth stratification in the country and the power imbalance that comes along with that.

As far as planning the community in response to this, I agree with Engels criticism of the underconsiderate planning of the infrastructure, both hardscape and unseen in the case of things like sewage,  come out of the lack of care entirely for the working class in these proto-industrial cities where the people were carelessly packed into whatever slum could hold them whether the conditions and quality of life were abysmal or not. This coalesced in poor conditions for the culture, environment, and physical health of all involved (farm animal and human).

The planning of communities in the developed world does not have anything as putrid as the planning of early industrial Europe, but we still have conditions that are serving the almighty dollar far more than they are serving the citizens who live upon them. We need to continue to step up the planning game with equity and ecology in mind to be able to create a symbiotic relationship within human culture as well as expanded into the local and overall ecology of the world. We need planning for necessity connection to nature, ability to walk and be outside as much as possible, intelligent water planning, and room for human interaction. We cannot allow for our lives to be planned around servicing efficient capital collection of the upper class. This battle is still being fought today as much as it was in the time of Engels, no matter how much better the bourgeois hide it now.

Links to consider

https://marxistsociology.org/2021/03/spatial-planning-and-marxism/

https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/fwcln6/any_leftistsocialistmarxistanarchists_working_in/

\https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm