Publication
Since the Industrial Revolution, Industrialists promoted and funded the development of housing projects, infrastructures, and social facilities around the production sites, some of them known as company towns. The scope was twofold: the entrepreneur or the company built and managed the community following business and production needs and promoted social harmony and social cohesion, providing services and goods for citizens’ consumption to enhance their living conditions urban health, where state services were not yet entrenched. the company towns could be retained as a valuable case study to examine how the urban rationalities and living conditions were shaped by industry politics. For this scope, this paper attempts to discuss the extent of the industry biopower in the context of cities entirely constructed by one company, with the case study of the city of Dalmine, a seamless pipe mill founded in 1906 in Italy. To reach this goal, the company town of Dalmine is investigated through archival research with a subsequent thematic content analysis of the house organ Conversazioni, from the company archives collected during two research periods in Fondazione Dalmine. The archival and thematic content analysis yields two main findings: (a) the company town was planned as a self-sufficient container environment in which urban planning and welfare policies appear as an instrument to exercise its biopower over the citizens; (b) the industry dictated the rules of working-class housing construction and entered workers' domestic lives with the incursion of industrial governance into the most intimate spheres of citizens was key to moulding citizens' values.