I'm personally interested in the ideas of Libertarianism and Anarcho-Capitalism, and as such, I found a term called Company town. I'll start this topic with the broad definition of the term, and try to place examples and other ideas connected to it, and that are similar to it. I'll also try to look into continuing this topic with my personal ideas and thinking regarding this model of cities.
I invite everyone to participate in this discussion and to share their ideas with me regarding the Company towns and other Libertarian ideas, as I'll see to start some other topics that I have interest in.
A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer. Company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, houses of worship, schools, markets and recreation facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Some company towns have had high ideals, but many have been regarded as controlling and/or exploitative. Others developed more or less in unplanned fashion, such as Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, United States, one of the oldest, which began as a Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company mining camp and mine site nine miles (14.5 km) from the nearest outside road.
Traditional settings for company towns were where extractive industries – coal, metal mines, lumber – had established a monopoly franchise. Dam sites and war-industry camps founded other company towns. Since company stores often had a monopoly in company towns, it was often possible to pay in scrip through a truck system, although not all company towns engaged in this particular practice. In the Soviet Union there were several cities of nuclear scientists (atomics) known as atomgrad; particularly in Ukraine those were Pripyat, Varash, Yuzhnoukrainsk among others.
The company town, a settlement completely owned, built and operated by an individual or corporate entrepreneur, is essentially a temporary pioneering device, especially suited to conditions obtaining in nations undergoing rapid economic development. In economic pioneering the town is used to open up previously unexploited territory. As a method of social pioneering it is a means of uplifting and moulding the worker through the socio-religious ideals of the philanthropic industrialist. In both cases, however, the town's raison d'être is the lack of initiative on the part of non-company private enterprise or local government in providing a total infrastructure for the new community. Coming into existence by default, the company town throve after the late eighteenth century in western Europe and areas of white colonial settlement, and, to a lesser extent, in their political and economic colonies. In general, extractive company towns have been the product of economic pioneering, and manufacturing towns of socio-economic forces. A typology of the company town includes some discussion of its characteristic social, economic and political features. Urban form and planning are considered in detail; the deliberate company policy of residential segregation by class is illustrated by a case-study. With the reduction of social and political isolation through the widespread use of air and motor transport and the rise of welfare state policies, the company town has tended to disappear in advanced economies. It still finds expression, however, in remote regions and in developing economies, whether imposed by Western capitalism or of indigenous origin, as in Japan. https://www.jstor.org/stable/621766
