Among the many interesting articles in The Next American City's Summer issue is one tracing the trajectory of the company town from the early days of the Industrial Revolution to the job-rich boomburbs of the present.
(Above: Life in the Googleplex; Mountain View, CA. More here.)
Author Elizabeth Evitts provides a useful definition of company town along the way:
According to the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a company town is “a community inhabited chiefly by the employees of a single company or a group of companies which also owns a substantial part of the real estate and housing.” Margaret Crawford uses this definition in her 1995 book, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns. Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, describes the first American iteration of this community type, the mill village, created by the textile industry in the late 1700s.
The best location for the company headquarters has changed dramatically, and this bears itself out at urban and regional scales. With the advent of network technology and the exodus of industry from most cities in the developed world, things like navigable waterways and proximity to natural resources become quaintly irrelevant. The most (only) important proximity is the one between a talented pool of labor, and the relative abundance or lack of opportunity for lifestyle pursuits (leisure, education...). While it may be fashionable to locate your company in the hull of a old factory in your city's formerly industrial waterfront, the raison d'etre of said water frontage--and said neighborhood, really--is cosmetic, its infrastructure a signifier of past productivity.
In Baltimore, and in cities around the country, manufacturing buildings have new uses. Procter & Gamble’s former manufacturing home on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was redeveloped in 2002 by developers Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. Renamed Tide Point (after the soap product that was made there), the 15-acre, multi-building campus serves as the headquarters for IT companies like Advertising.com, and for sporting apparel giant Under Armour. Notable at Tide Point are the on-site amenities for workers. There is a daycare center for employee children and a modern, sunny café; a gym and a waterfront promenade with hammocks, where, in summer months, delicate mists of cooling water refresh workers taking a break out of doors. Inside, the offices have ping-pong tables and lounge areas.
Location on the water, once a necessity for city industries, is no longer required. Business today is not as reliant on topographies. Increasingly, a company’s most important asset is between the two ears of its employees. In a creative class economy, the water imparts a psychic value rather than a logistical one, an amenity to attract creative workers. With business no longer wholly tethered to topology, cities are forced to rethink their relationship with companies.
Evitts notes that while such locations meet the needs of niche employers, many of the largest engines driving the current economy make their homes in bewilderingly large and complex corporate campuses, offering an all-encompassing lifestyle for employees. One such example is that of software company SAS in booming Cary, NC:
SAS is laid out like a college campus of sorts....You enter through a guarded gate and drive along winding roads lined with pristine gardens punctuated by outdoor sculpture. On a spring day in April, the sky that famous Carolina blue, a cool breeze rustles through thick woods over a footbridge traversing a meandering creek, giving the feeling less of a corporate facility and more of a state park. But then you look to the clearing, and topping the hill is a large building clad in corporate reflective glass surrounded by a landscape dotted with other large, innocuous office buildings. Unlike the college campus it’s emulating—where nice weather would lure class-skipping coeds to the outdoors—the sidewalks and footpaths at SAS are totally empty.
To encourage employees to be more productive, SAS offers employees a wide range of benefits within the confines of the corporate campus—a huge benefit, or a huge detriment, depending on whether you think this is all too Big Brother-ish. Lunch breaks, health club visits, childcare, and doctor’s appointments all take place right on the corporate campus. “You start feeling sick, you go get an antibiotic at the health center and you don’t get sick,” Chambers says. “So you don’t miss work.” Tide Point, Google, and SAS may not be the salt mines of yore, but the goal of companies over the centuries has remained relatively constant: maintain a productive workforce. “Companies are giving a lot of amenities today, especially in really prosperous industries like IT,” Crawford says. “In a way, it’s exactly the same thing as the company town of the past. The only reason companies ever really did that was because they needed to retain workers.”
The architecture of the SAS campus, in contrast to that of the Gap and Google, is intentionally generic:
Inside Building U, the environment is equally sterile. Quiet and still, there is a sense that workers are busy behind closed office doors. At SAS there is an unyielding focus on production and output. And there is definitely more conversation about software architecture than literal architecture. Goodnight never collaborated with an architect on the design of his mega-campus. As it grew, he hired a variety of planners and designers, and the resultant aesthetic is your standard corporate office park. The buildings are basic, the hair salon a modest room tucked in a corner of a much bigger complex. Some office buildings are designed to resemble an Embassy Suites, where a large interior courtyard is surrounded by several stories of open walkways with offices wrapping the exterior.
While the economic might of giants like SAS undoubtedly adds to the local tax base, the abundant in-house perks may end up hurting the local economy, says Evitts:
While cities like Baltimore struggle with big ticket concerns like housing and transit, they still benefit from inner-city companies’ creative class workers, who spend their disposable income on area businesses, arts and culture. At larger, far-flung corporate compounds like SAS, business and services normally provided by the township are corporate matters, further reducing income to the town and decreasing worker interaction with the community at large. Employees relate less to their non-work surroundings when errands like doctor appointments, schooling, daycare, gym, and salon trips happen under the auspices of the company. Any sense of normal life-work balance, or rather, work-community balance, seems fairly out of reach.
Unlike the mill towns of the 18th and 19th centuries, on-site worker housing is generally not part of the corporate campus equation:
Notably absent from the benefits list is the traditional company town perk of housing. Today it’s hard to imagine an American company dabbling in housing developments on its employees’ behalf, the way that, say, IKEA, does in Europe....In places like California, where prime real estate can be prohibitive, there seems to be a willingness to commute. Workers are trading higher salaries for longer drives (the award for the longest commute was given last year to a software engineer at San Jose-based Cisco Systems, who travels 372 miles every day). Crawford, the Harvard professor, says she thinks it’s unlikely that American companies will start offering worker housing again anytime soon.
The article ends with a fascinating proposition: what will happen to these complexes when, for unforeseen and inevitable reasons, they become obsolete? Will they be recycled like old factories and warehouses are now? Can they be?
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