Throughout the industrial world, cities were devastated during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929 and lasting through most of the 1930s. Worst hit were port cities (as world trade fell) and cities that depended on heavy industry, such as the steel and automotive industries. Service-oriented cities were hurt less severely. Political centers such as Washington, London and Berlin flourished during the Great Depression, as the expanded role of government added many new jobs.
British Commonwealth and Empire
Great Britain
Although the impact of the Great Depression on Great Britain was less severe than elsewhere, the industrial cities of the Midlands, the North, and Scotland were very hard-hit.Nigel Gray, Worst of Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (1985)
Liverpool and Manchester, with years of high unemployment, had already acquired a reputation as highly depressed areas. City leaders fought back, and promoted a series of reforms and innovations in infrastructure that made them leaders in urban redevelopment. Such projects included the Wythenshawe Estate, the Mersey Tunnel and Manchester Central Library. Promoters strongly emphasized how the redevelopment projects presented new images of Liverpool and Manchester. One goal was to integrate newly enfranchised voters, a strategy also employed by the Conservative Party to engage with the mass electorate.Charlotte Wildman, "Urban Transformation in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939," Historical Journal (2012) 55#1 pp 119-143.
Canada
Canada's economy at the time was just starting to industrialize primary industries (agriculture, fishing, mining and logging) to manufacturing. Exports and prices of raw materials plunged, and employment, prices and profits fell in every sector. Canada was the worst-hit (after the United States) because of its economic position. It was further affected as its main trading partners were the U.S. and Britain.
The hardest-hit cities were the heavy industry centers of Southern Ontario. They included Hamilton (Canada's largest steel center), Toronto, Tilbury, and Windsor, an automotive manufacturing center linked to its larger neighbour, Detroit. In Ontario, unemployment skyrocketed to roughly 45%.http://data4.archives.ca/netacgi/nph-brs?s2=&s4=&s3=&s1=kingston&s6=y+and+gif&s8=&Sect4=AND&l=0&Sect1=IMAGE&Sect2=THESOFF&Sect4=AND&Sect5=FOTOPEN&Sect6=HITOFF&d=FOTO&p=1&u=http://www.archives.ca/02/02011503_e.html&r=123&f=G Public works projects at the Royal Military College of Canada
The Prairie Provinces and Western Canada were among the hardest-hit; they fully recovered after 1939. The fall of wheat prices drove many farmers to the towns and cities, such as Calgary, Alberta; Regina, Saskatchewan; and Brandon, Manitoba.
Women held 2530% of the jobs in the cities.In Toronto women held 28%; in Winnipeg 26%; in Montreal 25%. Canada, Bureau of the Census, Occupations and Industries Vol. VII (Ottawa 1931), pp 226, 250, 190. Few women were employed in heavy industry, railways or construction. Many were household workers or were employed in restaurants and family-owned shops. Women factory workers typically handled clothing and food. Educated women had a narrow range of jobs, such as clerical work and teaching. It was expected that a woman give up a good job when she married.Margaret Hobbs and Alice Kessler-Harris, "Rethinking Antifeminism in the 1930s: Gender Crisis or Workplace Justice? A Response to Alice Kessler-Harris," Gender and History, (April 1993) 5#1 pp 4-15 Srigley emphasizes the wide range of background factors and family circumstances, arguing that "gender" itself was typically less important than race, ethnicity, or class.Katrina Srigley, "'In Case You Hadn't Noticed!' Race, Ethnicity, and Women's Wage-earning in a Depression-era City." Labour 2005 (55): 69-105.
Australia
During the Great Depression, different parts of Australian society experienced different hardships, challenges and opportunities. There was increased movement of many people to and from country areas in search of work. City and urban people planted gardens to produce fruit and vegetables. In some urban areas co-operatives were formed based on barter systems to share what was available. Shacks were built on the outskirts of large cities to house some who lost their homes.C. B. Schedvin, Australia and the great depression: a study of economic development and policy in the 1920s and 1930s (1970) Online review
Singapore Singapore, at the time of British colony, was integrated into the world economy and suffered economic declines like other trading cities. However the people of Singapore were resilient in coping. Those who remained in the city used complex relationships among Chinese kinfolk; they shared food, housing, and clothing, and minimized the negative impacts. They spread work around, and provided an intelligence network to assist relatives in finding temporary employment. The safety valve of emigration to rural areas reduced the overall negative impact.Kah Seng Loh, "Records and Voices of Social History: The Case of the Great Depression in Singapore," Tonan Ajia Kenkyu: Japanese Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. (2006) 44#1 pp 31-54.W. G. Huff, "Entitlements, destitution, and emigration in the 1930s Singapore great depression," Economic History Review (2001) 54#2 pp 290-323
Chile
As saltpetre and copper exports collapsed levels of unemployment rose dramatically causing a migration of unemployed saltpetre miners from the north to Santiago. Miners constituted around 6% of the active population but made up more than half of the unemployed during the crisis. Numerous soup kitchens sprang up in Santiago while homeless people begun to dwell in caves in the hills around this city.
France By 1930 France remained a significantly rural society, with just a single city of over a million inhabitants (Paris), two more of over half a million (Lyon and Marseille), and fourteen more of over 100,000 inhabitants. The worldwide Great Depression had a moderate impact on the French economy, which proved resilient. Conditions worsened in 1931 bringing hardships and a more somber mood. Unemployment rose, and hours of work were cut; however the price of food sharply declined, offsetting some of the hardship.Julian Jackson, The Politics of Depression in France 1932-1936 (2002) pp 23-27 The population of Paris declined slightly from its all-time peak of 2.9 million in 1921 to 2.8 million in 1936, with city-dwellers opting to return to the countryside to ride out the economic crisis among family. The arrondissements in the center lost as much as twenty percent of their population, while the outer neighborhoods, gained ten percent. The low birth rate of Parisians was compensated by a new wave of immigration from Russia, Poland, Germany, eastern and central Europe, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Political tensions mounted in Paris with strikes, demonstrations and confrontations between the Communists and Front populaire on the extreme left and the Action Française on the extreme right.Yvan Combeau, Histoire de Paris (Paris, 2013), p. 91
Germany
In Germany, the depression had reached its worst in 1932, with 6 million unemployed, spread throughout every city. From 1928 to 1932 unemployment in Berlin soared from 133,000 to 600,000. In Hamburg, a port city, the numbers went from 32,000 to 135,000. In Dortmund, in the Ruhr industrial region, it went from 12,000 to 65,000. Berlin verged on political chaos as Communist and Nazi paramilitary forces fought for control of the streets. Overall the Nazis were weakest in the largest cities, which were controlled by Socialist and Communist parties (and in Catholic areas, the Center party). After 1933, the Nazi government greatly expanded arms production, which reduced unemployment.Panikos Panayi, "Everyday Life in a German Town," History Today (2002) 52#9 pp p31-37.Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2008)
Berlin, and the other cultural centers, were especially hard-hit. The publicly subsidized city and state theaters that were the center of cultural life took heavy cuts. After 1933, the Nazis imposed a new, heavily subsidized cultural order that glorified Nazi ideals and ridiculed the artistic achievements of the Weimar era.Karl Christian Führer, "German Cultural Life and the Crisis of National Identity During the Depression, 1929-1933," German Studies Review (2001) 24#3 pp 461-486.
Japan In Japan, the hardest hit sector was urban commerce and services, which declined 23 percent in 1928–1933, followed by agriculture which declined 12 percent. However, manufacturing experienced positive growth in nearly every year. The 1920s economically were sluggish in Japan, and the financial crisis began earlier there, as a major banking panic occurred in 1927. Recovery was stimulated by heavy government spending, especially for the Army and Navy.Dick K. Nanto, and Shinji Takagi, "Korekiyo Takahashi and Japan's recovery from the Great Depression." American Economic Review 75.2 (1985): 369-374. Online Relief programs were focused on the politically important rural areas. Urban relief projects had low priority in the 1930s, since Tokyo had been heavily subsidized for rebuilding after the great 1923 earthquake.Henry D. Smith, "Tokyo as an idea: an exploration of Japanese urban thought until 1945." Journal of Japanese Studies 4.1 (1978): 45-80. Osaka used its own funds to expand new housing into suburban areas in the 1930s.
Soviet Union The Soviet Union was largely cut off from world affairs, and during the 1930s was engaged in a very large scale maneuver to force peasants off the land and relocating them in industrial cities. Many factories, electrical plants, and transportation facilities were built along these lines. The most dramatic showpiece was the Moscow subway. The Moscow Metro opened in 1935 and immediately became the centerpiece of the transportation system. It became the prototype for future Soviet large-scale technologies. Lazar Kaganovich was in charge; he designed the subway so that citizens would absorb the values and ethos of Soviet civilization as they rode. The artwork of the 13 original stations became nationally and internationally famous. For example, the Sverdlov Square subway station featured porcelain bas-reliefs depicting the daily life of the Soviet peoples, and the bas-reliefs at the Dynamo Stadium sports complex glorified sports and the physical prowess of the powerful new "Homo Sovieticus." (Soviet man).Isabel Wünsche, "Homo Sovieticus: The Athletic Motif in the Design of the Dynamo Metro Station," Studies in the Decorative Arts (2000) 7#2 pp 65-90 The metro was touted as the symbol of the new social order—a sort of Communist cathedral of engineering modernity.Andrew Jenks, "A Metro on the Mount," Technology & Culture (2000) 41#4 pp 697-723p Soviet workers did the labor and the art work, but the main engineering designs, routes, and construction plans were handled by specialists recruited from the London Underground. The Britons called for tunneling instead of the "cut-and-cover" technique, the use of escalators instead of lifts, and designed the routes and the rolling stock.Michael Robbins, "London Underground and Moscow Metro," Journal of Transport History, (1997) 18#1 pp 45-53. The paranoia of Stalin and the NKVD was evident when the secret police arrested numerous British engineers for espionage—that is for gaining an in-depth knowledge of the city's physical layout. Engineers for the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company were given a show trial and deported in 1933, ending the role of British business in the USSR.Gordon W. Morrell, "Redefining Intelligence and Intelligence-Gathering: The Industrial Intelligence Centre and the Metro-Vickers Affair, Moscow 1933," Intelligence and National Security (1994) 9#3 pp 520-533.
United States