Suburbs and offices - February 13, 2012

Took Anya out for a walk in the park with Ingrid this morning, then to the dog park in the afternoon. It was more of the same: a little cold, no snow, just drab cold. Then it snowed. Not a lot, but it is nice to have a bit of white on the ground. Anya, I suspect, will be in heaven tomorrow.

I've been working at home a bunch lately, as Ingrid has meetings downtown. She usually works from home, but I've been finding it not entirely to my liking. I like having folks around. It's possible I get more done in an hour at home, but only if it's work that I can do efficiently on my laptop...

"The office" is a pretty new concept in social terms. There have been workshops and workplaces for a long while, but the separation of company work into entirely separate neighborhoods from residential living doesn't date back much further than sometime in the 19th century. The first office workers—clerks in trade, banking and law—worked in offices, but modest ones. Ebenezer Scrooge and his assistant Bob Cratchitt (1830's, I think) were more the norm. The really big banking houses and houses of trade required larger staffs, but the sort of large work force we think of when we think of going to work "at a coporation" didn't really get underway until the railroads and great international shipping syndicates developed between 1830 and 1860.

Well, that's my theory, anyway, based on what I can recall from scraps here and there. But no, there were office clerks, armies of them, in service to 18th century government offices. The admiralty was crawling with them. And the East India Company? The Hudson's Bay Company? Surely they had more than a handful of record-keepers and scribes.

And what of suburbs? I think of suburbs as a byproduct of office culture, though there were plenty of blue-collar suburbs too. It's the suburbs, not the offices, that really drove the separation of work and home—people wanting to live away from the stench and filth of the central city, and so, when they could afford it, making the wage-earner into a longer-distance commuter.

Now that our cities are comparatively clean, we see that situation reversing, because it really is a pain in the neck to have to travel an hour each way to earn your living. And once the film of grime on everything is removed, cities are pretty great places.