Urban Lives: An Industrial City and Its People During the Twentieth Century

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

The past 200 years have witnessed revolutionary changes in living conditions for most people in the Global North. While the broad outline of these processes is well known through extensive research at the macro level, we still know very little about their micro-level foundations, largely due to the lack of appropriate data in most countries.

Through the lens of a Swedish industrial city, Landskrona, Urban Lives looks at economic and demographic change at the micro level of individuals and families to understand the societal transformations that profoundly changed people's lives during the twentieth century. These societal transformations--coinciding with industrialization, post-industrialization, and the emergence and culmination of the welfare state--encompassed groundbreaking advancements in living standards, a relocation of rural populations to urban hubs, and significant alterations in the fabric of everyday working life. Including an original data infrastructure, the book follows individuals and families in Landskrona across generations, and situates them in these broader social, institutional, and environmental contexts. Each chapter provides novel insights into the micro-level foundations of long term economic-demographic processes, and covers important research questions related to health, family, migration, and residential segregation. Original and comprehensive, Urban Lives offers an examination of twentieth-century demographic, social, and economic history, illustrating how personal choices and behavior were shaped by social transformation.