Urban historians have long portrayed suburbanization as the result of a bourgeois exodus from the city, coupled with the introduction of streetcars that enabled the middle class to leave the city for the more sylvan surrounding regions. Demonstrating that this is only a partial version of urban history, Manufacturing Suburbs reclaims the history of working-class suburbs by examining the development of industrial suburbs in the United States and Canada between 1850 and 1950. Contributors demonstrate that these suburbs developed in large part because of the location of manufacturing beyond city limits and the subsequent building of housing for the workers who labored within those factories. Through case studies of industrial suburbanization and industrial suburbs in several metropolitan areas (Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal), Manufacturing Suburbs sheds light on a key phenomenon of metropolitan development before the Second World War.

Robert Lewis is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 and co-editor of Urban History Review.

"At base, the arguments set out in this collection challenge a considerable amount of the collective wisdom about North American suburbs and will stimulate scholars and students to rethink what suburbs consist of and what the relationships are between cities and suburbs.... This work strikes at the heart of scholars' thinking about what suburbia looks like and was/is and who or what lived/lives there."—Mary Corbin Sies, University of Maryland

"In Manufacturing Suburbs, edited by Robert Lewis, eleven authors have done a pioneering and impressive job of sorting out some of the many complexities of industrial suburbanization in the United States and Canada during the century from 1850 to 1950.... All in all, Manufacturing Suburbs is an excellent study that should lead the way to further research into a hitherto neglected aspect of suburban history."—The Journal of American History

"The foremost merit of the book lies in the quality of the different contributions, written by major researchers in the field of urban history. Together, they provide a comprehensive view of the pre-World War II evolution of manufacturing in North American metropolitan regions and of its impact on their urban structure."—Urban Studies