Factory villages

In contrast to the company towns in North America and Asia, similar initiatives in western Europe usually take the form of a factory village. Both company town and factory village are characterized by the ownership of much or all real estate, buildings, amenities and business premises by a single company. Traditionally such company towns and factory villages were linked to extractive industries (coal, metal and sand) and manufacturing of bulk goods (glass, iron, textiles, etcetera). Typically these urbanized areas were developed in an isolated location and centered around a large production facility (a factory, ironworks or colliery). Most citizens will be directly or indirectly affiliated to the company. The goal of these settlements was after all to house the workers close to the production site. The term is now used to distinguish urban areas that are or were closely linked to a certain employer.

Factory villages tend to be much smaller in scale then for instance their American and Russian counterparts the company towns. Another difference is that most factory villages were developed just outside of existing towns and villages and only on rare occasions far from established communities. 

Early examples of workers housing can be characterized as colonies. These colonies are stand alone developments with a very regular layout of long parallel streets. A special type within these colonies are the development on the so-called Lotharingian model (pioneered in Alsace-Lorraine) with four dwellings within one building between two parallel lanes. Workers colonies were mainly built in the latter half of the nineteenth century. After 1890 we see different models appear in both Germany and England, the so-called model villages where a social reform agenda is expressed through workers housing and cultural facilities.

After 1900, and especially after 1918, workers housing is offered as part of a total package for employees that also includes sporting clubs, music groups, schools, sanitation (bathhouses and washhouses), parks, allotment gardens, shops, medical practice and so-on. The combination of socio-liberal ideas and the garden city movement led to a flurry of small and large scale developments were entrepreneurs would build garden villages (sometimes called garden city - Gartenstadt in German) for their employees and their families next to their factories or at least close by. Sometimes the land was to expensive in the immediate vicinity of the factory so they looked at farmland further afield. These developments never take on the size of a town, but are standalone villages or neigbourhoods near or in preexisting towns and villages. In rare cases such as Genk in Belgium, Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Essen in Germany urbanization was mainly instigated by factory villages*.

Housing linked to manufacturers in Eindhoven makes up most of the city up until 1960. The company Phillips did not only provide housing but also laid out parks and sporting grounds. DAF provided both housing and playing fields. Bata provided housing and facilities next to the factory. Other manufactures such as Van Abben, Mignot & DeBlock, Mennen-Keunen, Karel I Sigarenfabrieken, Pijnenburgh and Picus relied on private initiative to build houses for their workers. Within a red outline the factory housing (often called village) is marked. They are often near the factory sites (in yellow). In orange the workers housing built by building societies (Woningbouwverenigingen) is colored in. Within the pink outline we find  the villa parks. 

In Germany (Ruhrgebiet), England (West Midlands) and South Limburg (Oostelijke Mijnstreek) the many isolated colonies, factory villages and workers neigbourhoods together with post war developments merged into conurbations that often also include medieval hamlets, old towns and villages. Neigbourhoods erected for housing miners are usually called colony (Kolonie in both Dutch and German). This is even the case if they take the shape of a garden village. Garden villages are called Gartensiedlung (garden settlement) in Germany and Austria, Tuindorp (garden village) in the Netherlands and Tuinwijk (garden neigbourhood) in Flanders. In Germany and Austria they also speak of Gartenstadt (garden city) to designate apartment blocks in a green setting, similar to the way Cité-jardin is used in France and Tuinstad in the Netherlands. This type of Garden city always concerns municipal housing.    

* In the case of both Genk and Essen the initial urbanization was linked to mining.