Building Empire Otherwise: Towards an Urban Design History of Company Towns and Corporate Colonization in the Twentieth Century

As the twentieth century unfolded, company towns had been essential instruments to settler colonialism, acting as pioneering devices in the expansion of capital to frontier societies, unexploited territories, and indigenous lands. With the post-World War One crisis of Imperial power first, followed by the growth of nationalism, the spread of socialism, and the rise of the welfare state since the Second World War, company towns should have tended to disappear, yet continued to stubbornly proliferate. This paper seeks to explore how company towns strived to find a newly designed expression and purpose in the shifting geopolitical landscape of the 20th century, and how the implications of corporate colonization influenced space production. We draw on archival research and the lenses of political, economic, and urban design history to analyze two complementary case studies: the satellite towns built by the Bata Shoe Company, and the international market expansion of Dalmine S.p.A. from Italy to Argentina. These cases testify to the instrumentality of company towns in instances of aggressive international corporate expansion during, respectively, the interbellum and after World War II – specifically, towards new and previously unsaturated markets in the Global South. First, we analyze how corporate managerial systems and welfare programs manifested in the built environment of company towns, and whether they adapted to local conditions. Second, we examine how these towns were embedded in global networks of extractive activities, producing economic and ecological impacts that sustained systems of exploitation and colonization.