Urban Addendum

At the "Great Towns" (1845),  Friedrich Engels gives a vivid description of the living conditions of the working class in Manchester in 1844. By using the peripatetic method he describes this industrial city as " a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health..." and he succeeds to make the "invisible" problem of poverty, "visible". Instead of developing a model for the perfect "utopian" city, he prefers to ask questions for the existing  urban environment. The "Urban" becomes a question as the cities started been shaped by processes of industrialization, economic and politic changes occur and there is a huge population shift from rural to urban areas.  The class segregation of urban industrialism becomes a significant problem and In cities like Manchester and Liverpool mortality from smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough is much higher than in the surrounding countryside. This spatial chaos and the problems of the industrial cities that are being described by Engels and other scholars have been the main concerns that lead to the development of the urban theories during the pro-modernism and modernism era.