Urbanization

URBANIZATION (from Latin urbs - city), the general process of the formation of cities, that is, population centers whose economic base, unlike the countryside, is industry, commodity exchange, as well as the performance of administrative-political and other special functions. In particular and especially, urbanization is understood as the process that occurred during the development of capitalism: the rapid increase in the number of cities and the intensive growth of existing cities, the creation of giant cities in connection with the technical revolution, the growth of the proletariat, the concentration of the instruments of production and population in relatively few places, the organization of mass production on a new energy base (replacing water and wind with steam, and later with electricity, gas supply, etc.) with new transport technology (railways). The growth of urban construction under capitalist urbanization extremely complicates the tasks of communal services in cities (water supply, sewage, transport, etc.), leading to the separation of the exploited part of the population from nature. All this has a sharply negative impact on the life and health of the working population. The capitalist system with its class distribution of the means of subsistence leads to the fact that in cities these harmful social and hygienic consequences of capitalist urbanization are reflected particularly sharply on the working masses, in working-class neighborhoods, causing a sharp increase in mortality and morbidity among the proletarian population. «The 'improvements' and 'enhancements' of cities accompanying the progress of wealth,» says Marx, «by means of the demolition of poorly built quarters, the construction of palaces for banks, department stores, etc., by means of laying out streets for business intercourse and luxurious carriages, the laying of urban railways, etc., rapidly crowd the poor into worse and worse, increasingly overcrowded slums. On the other hand, everyone knows that the high cost of housing is inversely proportional to its quality and that the mines of misery are exploited by speculative builders with greater profit and less expense than the silver mines of Potosí ever were» (Capital, vol. I, p. 525, 1935 ed.). Such are essentially the negative aspects of capitalist urbanization and its influence on the health of the working masses. The process of urbanization during the heyday of capitalism developed quite intensively. Thus, in 1800, in the six largest cities of the USA (numbering over 8,000 residents), there were only 210,000 residents, including Philadelphia - 69,000, New York - 60,000, Baltimore - 26,000, Boston - 25,000, Charleston - 20.5 thousand, and Salem - 9.5 thousand. In 1890, cities with a population of over 8 thousand residents already numbered 448 with a total population of 18,284,000 residents. While the entire US population grew 12 times over 90 years, the urban population grew 87 times. - In Europe at the beginning of the 19th century there were only 21 cities with a population of over 100 thousand people, and the total population of these cities was 4,700,000 residents, with not a single city having a population of 1 million people. At the end of the 19th century, Europe already had 6 cities with a population of over 1 million residents, and in London, according to the 1911 census, there were 7,251,000 residents, while the total population of 147 European cities with a population of over 100 thousand residents reached 40 million people. Large cities showed extraordinary growth. Compared to 1800, Paris grew from 648 thousand residents to 2,871 thousand (1926); Berlin - from 172 thousand to 4,024 thousand (1925). Even more rapid was the growth of large US cities: New York - from 60 thousand to 11.6 million people (1927), i.e., 200 times (rounded), Chicago - from 3 thousand residents to 2 million, etc. Thus developed the concentration of population in large cities of Europe and America in the era of the heyday of capitalism. «The mere concentration of population in large cities,» Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England, «has very unfavorable consequences; the atmosphere of London can never be as pure, as rich in oxygen, as the atmosphere of some rural district; 2¹/₂ million lungs and 2¹/₂ hundreds of thousands of stoves, cramped in 3--4 geographical square miles, consume an immense amount of oxygen, which is replenished only with great difficulty, since the very layout of the city hinders ventilation. Carbon dioxide formed from respiration and combustion, due to its high specific gravity, remains on the street, while the main air current sweeps over the roofs of houses. The lungs of the population do not receive a sufficient amount of oxygen, and the consequence of this is physical and mental weakening and a decrease in vitality. Therefore, although the inhabitants of large cities are less subject to acute diseases, especially those accompanied by inflammatory processes, than country dwellers enjoying fresh, normal air, they suffer all the more from chronic diseases. If life in large cities already has a poor effect on health by itself, how great must this harmful influence of the polluted atmosphere be in working-class neighborhoods, where, as we have seen, everything seems to combine to make this atmosphere as bad as possible». The growth of the urban population invariably outpaced the growth rate of the rural population. In 1920–1921, the specific weight of the urban population in the total population of the country was characterized by the following data: Holland - 92%, England and Wales - 78%, Belgium - 78%, Germany - 64%, France - 56%, USA - 51%, Denmark - 43%, etc. At the same time, in the largest cities (with a population of over 100 thousand residents) lived: in England and Wales - 39% of the total population, in Germany - 27%, in Holland - 24%, in Denmark - 20%, in Belgium - 19%, in France - 15%, etc. Relatively late, in the middle of the 19th century, began the urbanization of Russia, which lagged behind in its capitalist development. The growth of Russia's population within modern borders and the accelerated growth of its urban population is characterized by the following data (in thousands): Years | Total population | Urban population | % urban population. 57,076 | 3,118 | 5.46. 61,700 | 6,993 | 11.33. 65,207 | 8,040 | 12.33. 78,692 | 10,159 | 12.92. 82,822 | 11,818 | 14.27. 109,593 | 14,058 | 12.82. 130,354 | 20,445 | 15.69. Bourgeois scientists who investigated this process of urbanization praised it as a «phenomenon of capitalism». The well-known bourgeois economist A. Weber in his capital work The Growth of Cities in the 19th Century says: «The most remarkable fact of the just-expired century is the concentration of population in cities». However, even these scientists could not deny the harmful influence of capitalist urbanization on the health of the broad masses of the working population and proposed a whole series of measures intended to eliminate this harmful influence. Basically, these proposals boiled down to three groups: 1) to the capitalist rationalization of the construction of large cities by increasing the number of storeys in buildings, expanding streets and city squares; 2) to methods of deurbanization, i.e., to such economic and urban planning in which cities were decentralized, population and production were relocated to new places so as not to create a concentration of the proletariat; 3) to methods of garden-city construction (see), which essentially was limited to the experimental construction of several, mostly philanthropic garden cities according to Howard's method. All the limitations of such measures within the framework of a capitalist society were exposed with complete clarity by the founders of Marxism. «Either these reforms become universal,» Engels wrote in The Housing Question, «and then they are followed by a corresponding decrease in wages, or they remain isolated experiments, and then their very existence as individual exceptions proves that their implementation on a large scale is incompatible with the existing capitalist mode of production». The philistine opportunism of «municipal socialism» «consists in this,» Lenin wrote, «that they forget the narrow boundaries of so-called 'municipal socialism' (in reality, municipal capitalism...). They forget that as long as the bourgeoisie rules as a class, it cannot allow the touching even from a 'municipal' point of view of the real foundations of its rule, that if the bourgeoisie allows, tolerates 'municipal socialism', it is precisely because it does not touch the foundations of its rule, does not affect the serious sources of its wealth, and extends only to that local, narrow sphere of expenditures which the bourgeoisie itself assigns to the administration of the 'population'». «Only a society,» Engels wrote in Anti-Düring, «capable of harmoniously setting its productive forces in motion according to a single general plan, is in a position to organize them in such a way that it will be possible to evenly distribute large-scale production throughout the country, in full accordance with its own development and the preservation and development of other elements of production. Thus, the elimination of the contradiction between town and country is not only possible, but it has become simply necessary in the interests of industrial and agricultural production, as well as for the purposes of public hygiene». It is precisely in this way that Soviet power solves the problem of settlement, and consequently the problem of urbanization.

During the years of the first and second five-year plans, the appearance of old cities changed, and a whole series of new cities grew anew on the basis of a planned industrial economy. A large number of cities were radically reconstructed: Kharkov, Baku, Stalingrad, Grozny, Novosibirsk, Stalino, Rostov-on-Don, Gorky, and others. A number of cities were built anew: Stalinsk, Dneproges, Magnitogorsk, Leninsk, Berezniki, Dzerzhinsk, Stalinogorsk, Karaganda, Kirovsk, and others. During the years of the first five-year plan, these cities turned into major industrial centers with tens and hundreds of thousands of inhabitants (Table 2). Table 2. Cities Population in thousands 1926 1932 Stalinsk ........ Magnitogorsk...... Karaganda . . :..... Kemerovo ........ Anzhero-Sudzhensk . . . Prokopyevsk...... Stalinogorsk (Bobriki) Berezniki ........ Krasnouralsk..... 4.0 21.0 30.0 10.7 - 180.3 165.0 116.0 100.4 90.0 90.0 39.5 34.9 30.8 Urbanization in the USSR proceeds not only in the direction of bringing industrial centers closer to their raw material base and consequently achieving a more uniform distribution of population, but also in the direction of changing the very character of urban construction. "The appearance of our large cities and industrial centers," Comrade Stalin said at the 17th Congress of the Party, "has changed. An inevitable feature of large cities in bourgeois countries are slums, the so-called workers' quarters on the outskirts of the city, representing a pile of dark, damp, mostly basement, semi-dilapidated dwellings where the destitute people usually huddle, rummaging in the dirt and cursing their fate. The revolution in the USSR has led to the disappearance of these slums among us. They have been replaced by newly built, good, and bright workers' quarters, and in many cases, the workers' quarters look better with us than the centers of the city." In the second five-year plan, there is carried out "the wide deployment of work to transform hundreds of industrial centers into well-appointed cities; the construction of thousands of houses with apartments equipped with all conveniences, with a total living space of 64 million square meters; the deployment of work on planning, improvement of urban transport, water supply, sewerage, paving of streets, landscaping, etc.; the construction of 'Houses of Soviets', 'Houses of Technology', parks of culture and rest, stadiums, theaters, clubs, cinemas" (from the resolution of the 17th Congress of the Party on the report of Comrades Molotov and Kuybyshev). This is how the questions of urbanization are resolved in the USSR. The Party resolutely struggles against two deviations on this issue: against the proponents of giant cities and against the deurbanists. The deurbanists (Okhitovich, Puzis, and others) preached: "socialist settlement is neither a city nor a village... in place of urban congestion, urban clusters, urban concentration of people, buildings, things—extracurricular, non-urban, decentric settlement... maximum remoteness of dwellings from each other... in place of a separate room for the worker—a separate building" (Okhitovich). "The urban setup is unacceptable either from technical or economic considerations, and even more so from a social point of view... After all, existing cities do not grow because their growth is necessary, but grow by virtue of inertia remaining from capitalist conditions of production" (Puzis). Puzis even goes so far as to call the metropolitan underground an "antisocial" type of transport. It is characteristic that one of the leaders of the wrecking organizations, the so-called Labor Peasant Party, Chayanov, stood at this same deurbanist point of view. In his utopian story "The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Country of Peasant Utopia", he preaches that the kulak government, "having been convinced by many-year practice of the danger posed to it by huge accumulations of urban population, passed a decree on the destruction of cities with over 20,000 inhabitants... The streets of Moscow began to empty... Moscow skyscrapers were destroyed by the hundreds, dynamite was often resorted to... Moscow is no longer a city, but a typical Russian village"... and so on. Chayanov clearly expressed in these lines the counterrevolutionary ideology of his party and the political harm of the deurbanists' preaching. The counterrevolutionaries hate the city as a factor of concentration of the revolutionary proletariat, as the "force of historical movement of society" (Marx), "as the great center of energy and culture" (Lenin). A sharp rebuff to the deurbanists was given by Comrade Kaganovich in his report at the June plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1931: "It goes without saying that the chatter about the dying out, decentralization, and self-liquidation of cities is nonsense. More than that—it is politically harmful. This is the same as practically raising the question now of the dying out and liquidation of the state. There is certainly a certain analogy here. A fine Bolshevik and revolutionary that would be who already now raised the question of the dying out and liquidation of the proletarian state! We know that the time will come when the state will wither away, but today we are strengthening it, today we are concentrating into a single fist all the forces of the proletarian state to fight the class enemies surrounding us, the more so since regarding cities the question of their withering away does not stand at all as it stands in relation to the state. We are moving toward the liquidation of the contradiction between town and country not on the basis of the liquidation of cities, but on the basis of their modification, the socialist remodeling of the countryside, and its elevation to the level of advanced urban culture" (Kaganovich L. M., For the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and the Cities of the USSR, pp. 72–73). Incorrect and harmful, especially from the point of view of social hygiene, is also the position of the proponents of the concentration of production in giant cities. From the point of view of the interests of public health, it is completely unnecessary to necessarily build giant cities, taking into account those harmful aspects of a large accumulation of population on a small area, which Engels spoke of in the quote cited above regarding London. The June Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1931 gave the following directive in this regard: "Taking into account that the further development of the industrial construction of the country must proceed along the line of creating new industrial centers in peasant regions and thereby bring closer the final elimination of the contradiction between town and country, the Plenum of the Central Committee considers it inexpedient to pile up a large number of enterprises in the currently established large urban centers and proposes not to build new industrial enterprises in these cities in the future, primarily not to build them in Moscow and Leningrad, starting from 1932." This decision of the plenum is a most important directive in resolving the issues of settlement and urbanization. On August 10, 1935, the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) "On the General Plan for the Reconstruction of the City of Moscow" was issued. By this historical decree, a grandiose plan for the reconstruction of the city of Moscow for 10 years and for the next 3 years is approved. The creation of a truly socialist city is envisaged, with a construction plan not only within the city limits but also in the 30-kilometer adjacent zone, with massive construction of large houses (at least 6 stories high) calculated to provide for a population of 5 million, with the removal of a number of industrial enterprises outside the residential limits of the city, with the reconstruction of the municipal economy radically improving the living and cultural conditions of the population. The unfolding of the socialist offensive along the entire front, the rapid growth of the country's industrialization, the enormous successes in the socialist remodeling and industrialization of agriculture have brought closer the implementation of plans for the settlement of the population in communist society and the elimination of the contradiction between town and country, as the founders of Marxism taught.