The emergent of electronic devices has been a recent phenomenon and with its rise is Foxconn.The rise of Foxconn is attributed to its founder’s commitment to the Fordist-Keynesian economic strategy – it is based on the production assembly model of Henry Ford. The company was found in 1974 by Terry Gou in Taiwan. The move from a small factory (of producing television knobs) to producing 40 percent of the world’s electronic devices entails a lot of changes and a lot of manpower. Foxconn, under Gou, has expanded from Taiwan into China and in that expansion Foxconn has built numerous manufacturing complexes to accommodate the large scale production that its clients require. The efficiency and ability for Foxconn to produce such quantities comes at a price for Gou and Foxconn. The scales of these interventions have uncountable effects on the city infrastructure, economic growth and the livelihood of their workers within the corporation. Foxconn went from a 12 person factory in 1974 to 1.3 million people in China alone today. To accommodate the work force, Foxconn has erected company complexes that keep their labor force on call at any time to make the productions and manufacturing of their products efficient and quick. The housing solution was to congest all these workers in company apartments. These sometimes come with 3 bunk bed high apartments with 8-12 persons to a room. These conditions along with long hours and little pay have resulted in labor audits, a high turn-over rate of employment and a large number of suicide deaths. All these events have caught the public eye and have forced Foxconn to take action and reconcile the way it accommodate its workers [BusinessWeek].

With the rapid pace of change in technology and people’s thirst for the latest gadget, Foxconn’s core business will not slow down in the near future. Its business model (based on the economy of scale) is suitable to meet all the consumer’s demands and given that leadership makes all the correct moves, Foxconn will continue its growth rate. Yet the recent press about torturous labor conditions and suicides in its complexes have force Foxconn’ partners to intervene and this has made Foxconn reconsider its role in the welfare of its employees against the backdrop of its own economic growth. It can be debated what the real motives behind Foxconn’s recently proclamations to alleviate some of these issues are, but these proposed solutions are meager adjustments that don’t address the underlying problem - which is the physical environment itself. This paper will argue that Foxconn needs to rethink its concept of the factory complex. One way to rethink is to follow the idea of the company town.

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