Excerpt from the Introduction to Fordism and the City "This is the Rouge--the world's largest industrial city!"1 So declared the small guidebook distributed to tourists visiting this city's historical museum in the 1930s. The city in question was praised in a series of impressive statistical facts: it contained nearly 16 million square feet of industrial build-ings, over 100 miles of rail tracks, and hosted nearly one hundred thousand workers daily. A hospital staffed by two hundred employees managed health and injury, an industrial trade school educated workers in advanced skilled trades, and a bus system facilitated rapid transportation from one end of the city to the other. Massive ocean-going ships docked at the piers lining the river that coursed along the edge of the city, and a system of pipes trans-ported a "half-billion gallons of water" per day from the river to the city center.2 The guidebook reveled in the power of a new kind of city--an indus-trious city whose machines of production worked twenty-four hours per day and seven days per week all year long; an infrastructural city with extensive transportation networks that supported vast systems of order; a technolog-ical city that offered a vision of the future through the latest advancements in science and engineering.