The term “cottage industry” is defined as “An industry where the creation of products and services is home-based, rather than factory-based” (http://www.investorwords.com/1163/cottage_industry.html). Cottage industries surprisingly still exist today, although our country seems to be made up of one giant corporation after another. If you Google the term, many links will turn up for actual cottage industries, which provide creative ideas for homemakers and handicrafts.

This small scale, local production has stiff competition today from corporations, however; in the past these cottage industries were merely bought up, relocated in cities, and eventually turned into the corporations. Well, first they became factories, or what sounds a lot like sweatshops of today. These factories provided the setting for Mumford’s “The Beginnings of Coketown.” They turned already industrial towns into “dark hives, busily puffing, clanking, screeching, smoking for twelve and fourteen hours a day, sometimes going around the clock.”

According to the article “In defense of the suburbs” by Leo Boland, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/oct/06/urbandesign.politics) this type of city no longer exists where it had originated. The former “Coketown” is now a center of finance education and culture. Boland also points out however that Mumford stated that a suburb was not and could not become a city. What happened in that age of cottage industries then? When their production and labor was bought up, relocated, and formed the first cities, it seems to prove that a suburb (or something of that nature) can in fact become a city.