company towns | architectural brands by víctor muñoz sanz
systems cl imate
efficiency modernity social ism
in the image and likeness Batawa: notes on an exported blueprint in southern Ontario
In January 2012 I visited Batawa for research funded by the Druker Traveling Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design that will take me to the world-wide network of Bata Shoe Company satellite towns.These are some brief traveller’s notes of the first visit to the Canadian site of a globally reproduced blueprint.
Antecedents
Three elevational hierarchies
The original Batawa factory in late 1939
victor munoz sanz
From 1904 to 1919, Tomas Bat’a, a shoe manufacturer in Czechoslovakia, worked in Lynn, Massachusetts, shoe centre of the United States, learning about modern methods of production. When he returned to Europe, the hybridisation of systems of scientific management absorbed in America with a socialist vision gave rise to an empire that became a field of spatial experimentation. New organisational ideas tackled problems such as industrial chaos, declining productivity and housing shortage. The functionality of modernism and urban planning projects were used as a tool for more efficient working and living conditions. Over the next thirty years, under the superbly-planned Bat’a system of management, the company grew to be a huge complex of comprehensive worldwide operations. It followed a strategy of decentralisation: capital, technology and expertise were exported to other industrialised countries, and to nations in early stages of development. The system that had been experimentally developed in Tomas Bat’a’s hometown, Zlin, was intensively replicated in satellite cities all over the world, building a network of production that used the agency of modern planning and design as means of both production and the communication of a image of modernity. The nazi occupation of Zlin during World War II broke the system, and its heir immigrated to Canada to rebuild the empire from the new world. The company bought a well-connected piece of land in southern Ontario; building the town that was to replace Zlin as the Bat’a capital, Batawa.
1. Batawa sits on a plain by the Trent River surrounded by forested hills, with an elevation change that ranges from 100 to 180 metres. Workers’ housing is in the flat area, as are the schools, churches, the community center and other public amenities. The factory stands also there, adjacent to the highway that parallels the omnipresent river. On the hillside on the southern edge of the town, the managers’ housing sits slightly higher than the workers’ bungalows. On top of the hill to the north stand the director’s house and Thomas Bata’s private home, looking magnificently over Batawa. 2. Water was pumped from the river directly to up to a water tower in the roof of the factory – water is a fundamental element in shoe production; its management was centralised and its use regulated according to the demands of the factory. After the factory took its share, water was conducted to a treatment plant near the building and then piped to the individual households. 3. The greatest elevational escape came from within the community of factory workers looking for recreation. A group of volunteers cleared part of a hill right behind the managers’ housing overlooking the town, and installed a primitive tow rope that transformed it into a ski hill. The hard work and determination of these people was an act of true community building that went beyond the life of factory and that today is the main attraction, social centre and economic engine of Batawa.
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