Industrial Revolution

LIVING CONDITIONS

From the start, industrialization meant the transformation of countries' populations from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban and this involved the migration of thousands from the agricultural south and west to the cities in the north (Bilbao in the Basque Country or Barcelona in Catalonia, or Madrid). As the number of factories grew, people from the countryside began to move into the towns looking for better paid work ( in Catalonia also from the villages, or small towns, in the centre or in the north moving to Barcelona and industrial colonies at the Llobregat area).

These early industrial cities created problems in three areas: living conditions, working conditions, and the social structure.

First of all, cities built so rapidly were also built shoddily. Some cities, as Barcelona, even had walls from the ancient times which closed their doors at night and couldn’t be torn down, so people had to live in them, in narrow streets with houses poorly built, and in incredibly crowded conditions.
Whole families were packed into single rooms, or sharing houses. Sanitation was virtually non-existent, making clean water a luxury reserved for the rich. Open sewers ran down streets carrying water fouled with industrial and human waste. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid, typhus, and tuberculosis often reached epidemic proportions.
Add to these problems air pollution and malnutrition, and one gets a picture of incomparable human misery. Alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and prostitution were natural outcomes of having to endure these conditions.