Overcrowding During Industrialization

In mid-nineteenth century new ideas and inventions in England, started the Industrial Revolution which started the United Kingdom on the road to industrialization. This big change of being industrialized, created lots of problems for England. This essay is going to discuss “to what extent was a lack of city planning responsible for overcrowding during the Industrial Revolution”. Massive amounts of people came to the cities from the villages for getting employed. City grew so fast, people needed places to live and there was no time for any urban planning so the government had to add so many buildings in really short time. Everything became crowded and looked ugly. The buildings that they built, were small, unlivable and neglected. People could

So many people came to the cites from the villages. According to OAH Magazine of History, “living in cities greater than 10.000 was 21% at 1801 but at 1891 the number increased to 62%”(Stuart M. Blumin). People were coming to the cites for getting employed. The growth was so fast that even the government couldn’t catch it up. Due to this uncontrolled population increase, the government had to add so many unplanned buildings. This was a big circumstance for them. They had to build factories to get people employed and tenements to give people a place to live. But all these buildings were built without considering the urban planning. It made everything look contaminated and crowded. As Britannica states, “As Western industrial cities rapidly expanded during the first part of the 20th century, factories encroached upon residential areas, tenements crowded in among small houses, and skyscrapers overshadowed other buildings. To preserve property values and achieve economy and efficiency in the structure and arrangement of the city.” (Susan S. Fainstein), I can tell that urban planning got messed up and the city got overcrowded during the industrialization process. This is another quote that shows how bad the city planning was during the era of the industrialization: “The slums, congestion, disorder, ugliness, and threat of disease provoked a reaction in which sanitation improvement was the first

Besides the city planning, the government forgot to put proper sanitation infrastructure to the cities. People couldn’t find a proper water sources. This also caused to the people's death as a result of cholera. Cholera was caused by bad water and because of lack of infrastructure people had to drink toilet water which is basically bad water. As Sanitation, Water and Health states “ “London can be traced back to the 1840s when the health of the city's population was seriously threatened by industrialisation, heavy pollution of the Thames and outbreaks of cholera resulting in demands for reform of the ways in which water was supplied, treated and disposed of within London.”(Rautanen et al,177) people suffered because of poor sanitation. Effects of the Industrial Revolution gives places a memory of a guy from industrialized Britain.

“I traversed this day by steam-boat the space between London and Hungerford Bridges between half-past one and two o'clock; it was low water, and I think the tide must have been near the turn. The appearance and the smell of the water forced themselves at once on my attention. The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid. . . . The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water”(Faraday). According to this memory, I can tell that sanitation was bad and, people might have drunk wastewater because of missing