How did the Industrial Revolution affect cities?
Damon O'Reilly
2025-04-22 17:31:14
Count answers: 1
As the populations of cities continued to increase, these municipalities were faced with the challenge of how to handle the influx of people. Problems like the availability of housing, overcrowding and the spread of infectious disease had to be addressed as quickly as possible, or the newly industrialized cities risked losing their citizens and the factories that employed them. Cities grew because industrial factories required large workforces and workers and their families needed places to live near their jobs. Factories and cities attracted millions of immigrants looking for work and a better life in the United States. Even during the Industrial Revolution, most Americans lived in the countryside. We were essentially a rural nation until about 1920. The 1920 U.S. Census was the first in which more than 50 percent of the population lived in urban areas.
Dwight Flatley
2025-04-22 16:37:59
Count answers: 2
The United Kingdom is a useful illustration of the extent to which the Industrial Revolution impacted urban areas. In 1801 about one-fifth of the population of the United Kingdom lived in towns and cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants. By 1851 two-fifths were so urbanized, and, if smaller towns of 5,000 or more are included, as they were in the census of that year, more than half the population could be counted as urbanized. The world’s first industrial society had become its first truly urban society as well. By 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, the census recorded three-quarters of the population as urban. The technological explosion that was the Industrial Revolution led to a momentous increase in the process of urbanization. Larger populations in small areas meant that the new factories could draw on a big pool of workers and that the larger labour force could be ever more specialized. Attracted by the promise of paid work, immigrants from rural areas flooded into cities, only to find that they were forced to live in crowded, polluted slums awash with refuse, disease, and rodents. Designed for commerce, the streets of the newer cities were often arranged in grid patterns that took little account of human needs, such as privacy and recreation, but did allow these cities to expand indefinitely. By concentrating large numbers of workers and their families in cities, industrialism ultimately led to modern life being unquestionably urban life for a vast majority of the world’s population.
Read also
- What role did the Industrial Revolution play in these developments?
- What is the main industry in Blackpool?
- Why was Blackpool popular in the 19th and 20th centuries?
- What were the changes in the Industrial Revolution in Britain?
- What areas did the Industrial Revolution influence impact?
- Who is Blackpool biggest rival?
- Why is Blackpool so important?
- Why was Blackpool important in ww2?
- What were two effects of the Industrial Revolution on British society?
- What are 5 impacts of the Industrial Revolution?
- Where was the greatest impact of the Industrial Revolution?
- Is Blackpool safe to swim?