ancient cities

Urbanization and industrialization in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Europe and North
America were accompanied by universal problems
of population dislocation, economic insta bility,
and increasing tension between adminis trators,
the public, and the poor over entitlement to relief.
While the establishment of the British workhouse
system in the 1830s was of considerable interest
to administrators in the United States, and British
manuals for providing residential institutions with
adequate plumbing and ventilation were certainly
consulted, U.S. poorhouses did not generally
employ British or other non-American institutions
as models. Instead, poor relief exhibited significant
regional variation, and administrators
adapted government regulations to local conditions
and individual cases as they saw fit.
Between the mid-eighteenth century and the
1830s, most American cities adopted an institution-based
system of poor relief in order to more
efficiently spend and account for public funds
(which now included regular appropriations for
poor relief) and for more effective supervision of
the poor. Poverty was a matter of increasing concern
in both urban and rural areas as the numbers
of applicants for relief grew and expenditures on
relief increased in spite of local officials’ efforts to
take responsibility only for poor folk who lived in
their communities. Real increases in poverty were
accompanied by widespread public perception that
the ranks of the poor were increasingly composed
of the “vicious” poor, who did not deserve the
support to which paupers of good character were
entitled.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a
growing faith in institutions as solutions to a wide
variety of social problems including mental illness,
criminal behavior, and poverty; institutions set out
to reform the characters and behaviors of their
inmates by providing appropriate housing, constructive
activity, and moral guidance. An institution-based
system would remain the model for
social welfa re in the United States for the rest of
the nineteenth century and into the twentieth,
when by mid-century, poorhouses either closed or
shifted to housing a variety of state-funded social
service programs.
See also Homelessness; Housing
Monique Bourque
Further Readings
Alonso, William
Crowther, M. A. 1981. The Workhouse System, 1834–
1929: The History of an English Social Institution.
Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Hoch, Charles and Robert A. Slayton. 1989. New
Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row
Hotel. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Katz, Michael B. 1996. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse:
A Social History of Welfare in America. 10th
anniversary ed. New York: Basic Books.
Mandler, Peter, ed. 1990. The Uses of Charity: The Poor
on Relief in the Nineteenth-century Metropolis.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Smith, Billy G., ed. 2004. Down and out in Early
America. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press.
Al o n s o , Wi l l i A m
19
William Alonso (1933–1999)—architect, regional
scientist, urban planner, demographer, and
regional policy analyst—developed the first and
enduring model of metropolitan land use decision
making and urban rent determination and went
on to a distinguished career as an urban theorist,
demographer, and policy advisor. Alonso came to
the United States from Argentina in 1941 at the
age of 14 when his distinguished philologist father
fled the repression of the Perón regime to take up
a position at Harvard University.
Early on, Alonso was a theorist relying upon
deductive reasoning and empirical analysis to
explore urban spatial form. He was the first PhD
graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s pioneering
regional science department and a founding
member of the Regional Science Association.
As a young professor in city and regional planning
at University of California, Berkeley, he initiated,
with others, the social science revolution in urban
planning that addressed larger issues of urban evolution
and policy with tools from economics,
political science, and sociology. Alonso’s interdisciplinary
background was a tremendous strength,
and he became a leading demographer in the
1970s as director of the Center for Population
Studies at Harvard University, where he headed an
extraordinary academic review of the U.S. Census
that resulted in significant changes. He became a
prominent theorist of European urban system