Examines how towns across the United States have grown thanks to the existence of one large business being run from the community, discusses how those single-business communities have influenced the American economy, and explores the benefits and consequences of these towns.

2017 Winner of the Sunburst Award Society's Copper Cylinder Adult Award 2017 Canada Reads Finalist 2017 Locus Award Finalist for Science Fiction Novel Category 2017 Sunburst Award Finalist for Adult Fiction 2017 Aurora Awards Finalist for Best Novell Madeline Ashby's Company Town is a brilliant, twisted mystery, as one woman must evaluate saving the people of a town that can't be saved, or saving herself. "Elegant, cruel, and brutally perfect, Company Town is a prize of a novel." —Mira Grant, New York Times Bestselling and Hugo-Award nominated author of the Newsflesh series New Arcadia is a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bio-engineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig—making her doubly an outsider, as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire. Still, her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline? Meanwhile, a series of interconnected murders threatens the city's stability and heightens the unease of a rig turning over. All signs point to a nearly invisible serial killer, but all of the murders seem to lead right back to Hwa's front door. Company Town has never been the safest place to be—but now, the danger is personal. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Built by industrialists whose early businesses contributed to the escalation of the Industrial Revolution, company towns flourished in countries that embraced capitalism and open-market trading. In many instances, the company town came to symbolize the wrecking of the environment, especially in places associated with extractive industries such as mining and lumber milling. Some resident industrialists, however, took a genuine interest in the welfare of their work forces, and in a number of instances hired architects to provide a model environment. Overtaken by time, these towns were either abandoned or caught up in suburban growth. The most thorough-going and only international assessment of the company town, this collection of essays by specialists and authorities of each region offers a balanced account of architectural and social history and provides a better understanding of the architectural and urban experiences of the early industrial age.

“Company town.” The words evoke images of rough-and-tumble loggers and gritty miners, of dreary shacks in isolated villages, of wages paid in scrip good only at price-gouging company stores of paternalistic employers. But these stereotypes are outdated, especially for those company towns that flourished well into the twentieth century. This new edition updates the status of the surviving towns and how they have changed in the fifteen years since the original edition, and what new life has been created on the sites of the ones that were razed. In the preface, Linda Carlson reflects on how wonderful it has been to meet people who lived in these towns, or had parents who did, and to hear about their memorable experiences.

A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer. Company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, houses of worship, schools, markets, and recreation facilities. In the company towns of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a worker's boss did extra duty as a landlord, store owner, and constable. The on-site mill manager in Simmons, a town named after the furniture maker, even ran a successful baseball team. Built around iron mines and lumber concerns and directed by prominent entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, these industrial hamlets once lined the shores of Lakes Michigan and Superior.

During the interwar years, the footwear industry was confronted with similarly revolutionary changes and processes to those in the automobile industry which tend to be associated with the name of Henry Ford. Their major vehicle became the originally Czechoslovak enterprise of the Bat'a siblings, which, during the first decades of the twentieth century, grew into a gigantic concern with global reach. Seventeen researchers from Europe and North America trace the fascinating story of the Bat'a concern, a substantive chapter of which from the end of the 1920s became the establishment of company towns. From various perspectives, they focus their attention on this unique model of industrial organization which was discussed widely in its time and which in retrospect can be considered one of the true pinnacles of private capitalist urban planning in the first half of the twentieth century.

A survey of those towns traditionally associated with textiles, mining or tool manufacturing, particularly those which sprang up during the Industrial Revolution. The text describes and compares the concurrent development of selected towns in Europe and North America.