A characteristic of the 21st century for urban and architectural knowledge is dealing with contemporary challenges such as a failure of traditional economic models, a technological turn, human displacement across territories, a shift in environmental forces and a prohibition of race critics, which are the inheritance of colonial pasts. Whilst these challenges describe an emerging regime, they are nothing new from a historical perspective. Urban and architectural historians, for instance, have tended to concentrate their attention on the Industrial Revolution, its industrial cities that were not urban at all, presenting a life expectation of 28 years and squalor similar to pre-Black Death due to air pollution, absence of a sewage system and housing for poor peasant youngsters and their families within industrial premises surrounded by many coal fires or in cellars with no ventilation, washing facilities for bodies and clothes, but not on its colonial deconstruction as a major restructuring of the social and cultural order of the West and the rest of the world. And yet, urbanism and architecture have attempted to solve this not-urban industrial city condition over time by hosting other disciplines and transposing visions of single, or groups of, minds to inform ideal urban and architectural settlements. In this, Ebenezer Howard and his book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), describing a healthy city with virtues of suburbs as the natural unit for future urban expansions, have informed the construction of ideal experiments in urbanism, architecture, and their socio-cultural, technological, environmental and economic organisations such as company towns. However, their ideal and healthy wide parks, public spaces and carefully erected clusters of buildings also offered models for colonial destruction of reasonable conditions for working and dwelling. Despite their inventors and ideals, company towns have dynamically explored urban and architectural responses to profound economic, socio-cultural, technological, and environmental challenges facing Europe as well as colonially exploited Central Africa. Drawing on the ideas of an evolving interrelationship of disciplines, economic and productive models, thereby their materialisation throughout urbanism and architecture, this paper investigates the representation and constitution of company towns and thereby their founders’ narrative according to the logic of ‘teleported urbanism’ suggesting mechanisms that not only produce ideal and healthy places and/or spaces displaying a comprehensive quality of vernacular materials and their details for European industrial cities to be and their young migrated occupants from the countryside, which have led some commentators to describe company towns as working-class settlements cloaked in a middle-class design; but also the spatiotemporal and socio-cultural simulations and exterior effects of intentional colonial violence on Central Africa land and their displaced Indigenous populations with the erection of foreign bare metal structures cladded with a mixture of corrugated iron sheets and bricks and the cutting and incineration of forests to make space for new plantations. By welcoming a comparative review of past company towns and their colonial twins, respectively Port Sunlight (1898) in Wirral near Liverpool, the United Kingdom and Leverville (1911) in Kwilu, Belgian Congo - now Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - by William Lever and Lever Brothers, this paper touches upon aspects of land grant and grab, urban and architectural design and their materials, working and dwelling practices, visible only insofar in their systemic coupling with their founders’ code of conduct and its ideal and healthy models. Consequently, the analysis will use ‘teleport urbanism’ to explore ‘displacement’, or what could be framed as the notion of ‘tele-place’, engaged in the subject of land grab and extraction for, and urban and architectural design of a colonial company town and its oil palm plantations problematised as a result of not mere questions about forms or crafts but also about who made the company town, how it was funded, from which land it was extracted. Secondly, the paper will investigate ‘exteriority’, or the notion of living in another place, addressing questions of dwelling in a material, spatial and temporal otherness as an intentional and violent colonial contrast to Central Africa Indigenous population settlements. Thirdly, the paper will examine ‘simulation’ or what could be described as the space of simulacra or ‘simul-place’, enquiring about the authenticity of everyday life, work and/or exploitation of young Indigenous people in oil palm plantations in the cultural specificity of a Central Africa context thereby its representation via photographs, illustrations, magazines and many others archival sources held at the Unilever Archives. In order to conclude, this paper provides a laboratory for the definition of a trans-critical position on company towns, their discrepancies and controversies in a European colonial regime, equally concerned with individual and collective agencies, technocratic castes and democracies, most and least privileged forms of everyday life, humans and non-humans, strategies for the planning of and caring for/preserving these company towns and the planet more widely as a reaction to a consumer anthropocentric Western civilisation as it currently exists.
Port Sunlight and Leverville: Teleported Urban scapes of Oil Palm in a Colonial Europe of the19th Century
D. Landi
2025-01-01
Abstract
A characteristic of the 21st century for urban and architectural knowledge is dealing with contemporary challenges such as a failure of traditional economic models, a technological turn, human displacement across territories, a shift in environmental forces and a prohibition of race critics, which are the inheritance of colonial pasts. Whilst these challenges describe an emerging regime, they are nothing new from a historical perspective. Urban and architectural historians, for instance, have tended to concentrate their attention on the Industrial Revolution, its industrial cities that were not urban at all, presenting a life expectation of 28 years and squalor similar to pre-Black Death due to air pollution, absence of a sewage system and housing for poor peasant youngsters and their families within industrial premises surrounded by many coal fires or in cellars with no ventilation, washing facilities for bodies and clothes, but not on its colonial deconstruction as a major restructuring of the social and cultural order of the West and the rest of the world. And yet, urbanism and architecture have attempted to solve this not-urban industrial city condition over time by hosting other disciplines and transposing visions of single, or groups of, minds to inform ideal urban and architectural settlements. In this, Ebenezer Howard and his book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), describing a healthy city with virtues of suburbs as the natural unit for future urban expansions, have informed the construction of ideal experiments in urbanism, architecture, and their socio-cultural, technological, environmental and economic organisations such as company towns. However, their ideal and healthy wide parks, public spaces and carefully erected clusters of buildings also offered models for colonial destruction of reasonable conditions for working and dwelling. Despite their inventors and ideals, company towns have dynamically explored urban and architectural responses to profound economic, socio-cultural, technological, and environmental challenges facing Europe as well as colonially exploited Central Africa. Drawing on the ideas of an evolving interrelationship of disciplines, economic and productive models, thereby their materialisation throughout urbanism and architecture, this paper investigates the representation and constitution of company towns and thereby their founders’ narrative according to the logic of ‘teleported urbanism’ suggesting mechanisms that not only produce ideal and healthy places and/or spaces displaying a comprehensive quality of vernacular materials and their details for European industrial cities to be and their young migrated occupants from the countryside, which have led some commentators to describe company towns as working-class settlements cloaked in a middle-class design; but also the spatiotemporal and socio-cultural simulations and exterior effects of intentional colonial violence on Central Africa land and their displaced Indigenous populations with the erection of foreign bare metal structures cladded with a mixture of corrugated iron sheets and bricks and the cutting and incineration of forests to make space for new plantations. By welcoming a comparative review of past company towns and their colonial twins, respectively Port Sunlight (1898) in Wirral near Liverpool, the United Kingdom and Leverville (1911) in Kwilu, Belgian Congo - now Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - by William Lever and Lever Brothers, this paper touches upon aspects of land grant and grab, urban and architectural design and their materials, working and dwelling practices, visible only insofar in their systemic coupling with their founders’ code of conduct and its ideal and healthy models. Consequently, the analysis will use ‘teleport urbanism’ to explore ‘displacement’, or what could be framed as the notion of ‘tele-place’, engaged in the subject of land grab and extraction for, and urban and architectural design of a colonial company town and its oil palm plantations problematised as a result of not mere questions about forms or crafts but also about who made the company town, how it was funded, from which land it was extracted. Secondly, the paper will investigate ‘exteriority’, or the notion of living in another place, addressing questions of dwelling in a material, spatial and temporal otherness as an intentional and violent colonial contrast to Central Africa Indigenous population settlements. Thirdly, the paper will examine ‘simulation’ or what could be described as the space of simulacra or ‘simul-place’, enquiring about the authenticity of everyday life, work and/or exploitation of young Indigenous people in oil palm plantations in the cultural specificity of a Central Africa context thereby its representation via photographs, illustrations, magazines and many others archival sources held at the Unilever Archives. In order to conclude, this paper provides a laboratory for the definition of a trans-critical position on company towns, their discrepancies and controversies in a European colonial regime, equally concerned with individual and collective agencies, technocratic castes and democracies, most and least privileged forms of everyday life, humans and non-humans, strategies for the planning of and caring for/preserving these company towns and the planet more widely as a reaction to a consumer anthropocentric Western civilisation as it currently exists.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
