Urbanization
Living conditions in cities worsen
Looking for jobs
People from the country start to move to the city in search for a job. The increase in population made the cities overcrowded and it promoted more factories to open. The more factories and people there were, the worse the living conditions became.
Population increases
The population in Manchester, Britain went from 17,000 people in the 1750's to 40,000 people by 1780 and 70,000 people by 1801. The large increase in the population provided more workers for factory owners. The factory owners provided small, crowded, stuffy, unsanitary slums for workers and their families to live in, even several families lived in one house. There was no proper sewer or trash collection, so garbage and sewage filled the streets.
Disease
With every ones sewage and trash just rotting in the streets and poor personal hygiene, it made it easy to catch and spread diseases like typhoid, measles, cholera, and worst of all, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis took the lives of 30 million people. The life expectancy of workers were short. A worker in Manchester by 1842 was only expected to live to be 17 years old.
Living conditions in slums
Inside of the crowded slums, each family had one medium sized room to live in. Most of the time they had to share their house and live with several other families. There was very little ventilation in the rooms so it made them stuffy. They had very few beds and blankets and no kitchen. Some people got to have a yard, but they were small. Maybe 6 feet by 6 feet. They didn't even have any running water or toilets. Everything inside and out of the houses, including the people, were completely black from the coal dust produced from the factories.
Living conditions improve
City planners realized how bad the living conditions were for the people, so they decided to help out with that. They created sewer systems, under ground pipes that carried people's raw sewage to a dump sight. They also built skyscrapers and made streets bigger. The skyscrapers were for the people who needed to be housed and provided very nice rooms for them. The bigger streets made the city feel less crowded and provided more room for transportation. The workers who lived in slums also got to have better housing, running water, a bathroom, and didn't have to share with as many people.