Social Change 767overwhelmingly concentrated in urban centers. Mechanized agriculture
and falling agricultural prices reduced demand for farm laborers, encour
aging migration to towns in search of work in the booming service sector or
in industry. The population of Istanbul doubled in forty years, reaching
850,000 by 1886, swollen by the influx of Muslim refugees from Russia
and the Balkans. Warsaw’s population grew by more than four times from
about 160,000 in 1850 to almost 800,000 people in 1911; two-thirds of
the Polish city’s buildings had been built in the nineteenth century. In
Central and Eastern European cities like Prague and Tallinn, Czechs and
Estonians, respectively, arrived in greater numbers from the countryside,
changing the ethnic composition of these places.
Although some working-class families now lived in marginally more spa
cious lodgings, many densely packed urban neighborhoods became ghastly
slums. London had its infamous “back to back” row houses, with little or no
space between the houses and room for little more between the rows than
outdoor toilets, if that, and garbage heaps. For most British workers, a parlor
(a family room), a sign of “respectability,” remained only a dream. In Glas
gow, Scotland, a third of the city’s families lived in one room, as more and
more highlanders crowded into tall tenement dwellings.
As Paris became ever more crowded, Emperor Napoleon III had under
taken a massive rebuilding project in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s.
He entrusted the planning to Baron Georges Haussmann (1809-1891).
Together they planned the most extensive project of urban renewal since
the rebuilding of London following the great fire in the seventeenth cen
tury and that of Edo (Tokyo) in Japan at about the same time following the
great conflagration of 1657.
Napoleon III and Haussmann wanted to facilitate the expansion of com
merce and industry through the creation of long, wide boulevards, which
would be lined by symmetrical apartment buildings. It was not a coincidence