Title: Nature
1Natures MetropolisA Lead-in For Environmental
Inequalities
- 19th C Chicago, IL, first,
- then 20th C Gary, IN
Alan Rudy Spring 2002 ISS 310
Thursday, February 15
2Nature Made Chicago!..?
- Key Ecological Determinants of Chicago
- River to swampy ridge between Great Lakes
Watershed and Mississippi Watershed - What ecological forces generated that ridge?
- What did that mean in terms of economic
potential? - On a lake at the meeting of
- the Western Prairie,
- the Eastern Oak-Hickory Forests and
- the Coniferous North Woods.
3Country and City remake each other
- As the city grew it altered the way people
perceived the region so as to make everything
seem centered upon itself and its remarkable
growth. (25-26) - Eventually displacing Cincinnati and St. Louis
becoming the prime conduit between New York, New
Orleans and Denver. - For the city to play that role, however, the
land had first to be redefined and reordered
such reordering required conquest. (26)
4The Natural Closing of the American Frontier
- Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the
different Wests of the United States had
recapitulated the social evolution of human
civilization as Europeans and easterners
repeatedly encountered the zone of free land
and primitive savagery what he called the
frontier that was the source of American
energy, individualism and American democracy.
(31)
5TURNERS EVOLUTIONARY STAGES OF SOCIETIES
- Pastoral Stage
- Sparse Farming
- Dense Farming
- Cities and Factories
6City Core or Residual Effect?
- Turner vs. the Boosters Turner saw the city as a
residual phenomenon a phenomenon which marked
the end of the frontier in time and the tale end
of the frontier in space and the Boosters saw
the city as a necessary component of the
settlement of the frontier. - Nevertheless, Turner and the Boosters emphasized
natural and historical processes of social and
spatial evolution.
7Why Chicago?
- Market in the Mud
- Lousy Harbor, Swampy Plains, High Water Table
- Artificial Corridors
- Canal, Railroads
- Railroad Time
- Overcoming Space and Time
- The Logic of Capital
- Control, Variable, Fixed and Operating Costs,
8Market
- City streets became places where the products of
different ecosystems, different economies, and
different ways of life came together and
exchanges places. (61) - The number and scale of such interregional
trading connections critically determined a
citys eventual position in the urban hierarchy.
(62)
9 Tweener-ville
- Eastern/Chicago urban businesses organized and
managed rural capital in RRs (remember the
ideology of a rising tide floats all boats!) - Rural interests were as excited by lower
transportation costs and by possibilities for
real estate speculation the easy buck.
10Railroads and Space
- Railroads did not conform to topography,
geography, or ecology they sought linear
trajectories from one market to the next. - In additional to overcoming the chaos of
ecological spaces, railroads overcame the
seasonality of ecological time. - Space was made larger and more regular, time was
made universal and cut into pieces, and both were
made linear.
11Railroad Time
- These changes in space and time still depended on
crop production cycles and seasonal markets. - The accelerated movement of people, commodities
and information (w/ RRs and telegraphs) sped time
up - it made peoples lives move faster, more
productive, and their time more valuable (given
its greater productivity) meaningless under
usufruct and use-value.
12Temporal Improvement
- RRs made time available for further improving
nature, the land, and tools/machinery, which
increased the demand for the means to do so
means transported by rail and often generated,
later, by the land grant universities. - Time became something to be scientifically
managed and accounted for. - Time zones, generated for RRs schedule
efficiency instituted in the 1880s, federal law
after WWI.
13Capital Investments, Science, Math and Labor
- Land, rails, engines, cars, stations, fuel and
labor were all owned and managed by rail
corporations radically different from canals,
lake and ocean shipping, and most road transport.
- Property everything had to be accounted for
(accounting) and analyzed (comparative
statistics) and planned (bureaucracies and
managers).
14It all comes together
- See? Social AND Ecological relations utterly
transformed in the process of the coevolution of
country and city.
15Trade, Space and (Inter-)Dependency.
- A gateway, not a center. The more goods flowed
to Chicago, the more central Chicago became and
the more the hinterlands became dependent on the
city. - Trade produced the spatial zones and temporal
characteristics of Chicago and the Great West,
not the frontier (Turner), nature (Boosters) or
rents (von Thunen). - It is second nature and first nature comingled..
16Prairie, Grain, Livestock
- p.98 Extraordinary richness of prairies, and
the difficulty of plowing the soil, generated the
need for all kinds of new technologies for the
manipulation of nature. - Whiskey, hogs and other livestock were
commodities made from grain easier than grain
to transport to market!!
17Ecosimplification
- Capital (invested in the land)
- Technology (large iron and steel plows)
- Timing (too early, native weeds grew back, too
late, crop didnt reach maturity) - Cropping (tending the field post-planting)
- Ecosocial Simplification and Change.
- Holistic prairie ecology made way for simplistic
agricultural one. - Corn (low , livestock) and Wheat (high , eat)
18Sacks, Elevators and Capital
- The sack facilitated the labor-intensive, manual
transfer of the small produce of small farmers
from cart to pier to flatboat to levee to
steamboat to sailing craft. - Sales of actual physical sacks of grain. This
was the old C-M-C approach to market exchange. A
farmer started with a commodity, C, which was
then transported via a complex division of labor
until sold for money, M, which then allowed for
the purchase of new commodities of equal value to
that of the grain.
19Sacks, Elevators and Capital II
- The high FIXED and OPERATING costs of railroads
meant that the inefficiencies of individual bags
being moved slowly by high (VARIABLE) labor cost
processes was not profitable. - The RRs needed, automatic machinery, the
steam-powered grain elevators, to be economically
efficient. Death to the sacks!!!! All this
reduced to LABOR COSTS!!!!
20Oops, forgot slavery(in both books)
- SOMETHING CRONON DOES NOT MENTION!!! One reason
river systems in St. Louis remained as
competitive with the rail systems of Chicago
before the civil war was because of the low labor
costs of slavery.
21Sacks, Elevators and Capital III
- Chicago Board of Trade RATIONALIZATION
- volume gradations (size, like a solid) become
about weight (viable for a fluid) - centralization of trading (established during
market boom of Crimean War.) - Trade centralized into the floor of the Board
advantages of trading there unavoidable soon. - Uniform standards for Three Categories each with
Four Grades
22Commodities or Capital Circuits?
- Most importantly, however, the key player was no
longer the C-M-C farmer but the rail-investing,
elevator-owning, Board of Trade member whos
relationship was M-C-M. - For this person, money (M) bought a standardized
and graded commodity (C) which could be sold at a
time when a price higher than that at the start
was available and more money could be earned (M).
23Water, Lumber and The Plains
- Rivers made for natural corridors for floating
trees to Chicago. - Prairie ag needed northern wood and northern
woods needed prairie food. - Winter lumber crews were often summer ag
employees
24Lumber Rationalization (like Grain)
- Lumber grades and standards were established
remained more differentiated and qualitative than
that of grain - how might you blend a piece of timber/lumber?
- Under these conditions balloon frame housing
was developed at one level it increased the
demand for wood, at another level it decreased
the demand for thick beams. - Nails and smaller lumber made construction
easier, demanded less skilled labor, then old
style.
25Eco-connection and Eco-simplification
- Stockyard/grain elevator parallels concentrated
an abundant but scattered natural resource in
the creation of new kinds of commodities. - Another instance of western production meeting
eastern markets in Chicago markets.
26Eco-relations and Class-relations
- New markets and infrastructures led to new class
relationships livestock hands did not mix with
livestock traders who stayed in hotels etc. at
stockyards. - Corporate connections between grain farmers,
stock raisers and butchers feed the alienated
separation of people form nature and production.
27High Cost, natural wood vs. Low Cost, social,
Barbed Wire
- As on small farms, fencing was a large
investment, though necessary on the range as a
means to keep herds separate. - But, by this point, wood was expensive, esp. when
the open range needed to be fenced rather than
the enclosed farm. - Fencing became affordable when Glidden invented
Barbed Wire -- less wood.
28Disassembling the Hogs of War
- Cincinnati and the disassembly line
pre-Taylorization, scientific management and
discipline - Cincinnatis disassembly line was appropriated,
perfected and expanded in Chicago - Chicagos dominance over Cincinnati and hogs, as
with Saint Louis and grain, was cemented by the
Civil War. The armys demand for meat, the
closing of southern grain markets, the feeding of
surplus grain to hogs, and the ease of rail
transport to and from Chicago were all key.
29Cold Cuts
- Winter cut and stored ice, transported quickly by
rail, associated with Chicagos beef trade made
huge capital investments in buildings and
equipment for the livestock much more efficient
making a 3 month trade 12. - SWIFT and the ice/refrigerator car, packed beef
surpasses shipped cattle in 1883-84, worked with
a chain of icing stations until mechanical
refrigeration arrived around 1900.
30Meatpackers vs. Rails
- Not easy to overcome consumer resistance to
packed and shipped, non-local, meat. However, the
5-10 lower cost of dressed meat helped a good
bit the late 1800s were not good economic
times. - Quantified grades/standards emerge for
post-slaughter meat qualitative evaluation
continued pre-slaughter. - For large meat packing operations, expensive cuts
could be used to subsidize the distribution and
sale of meat local butchers would have had to
have thrown away. - Railroads resisted. 1) investments in stockyards,
2) reduced volume of traffic for dressed meat vs.
livestock.
31Interconnected Markets and Ecologies
- The Iowa farm family who raised corn for cattle
purchased from Wyoming and who lived in a
farmhouse made of Wisconsin pine clothed
themselves with Mississippi cotton that
Massachusetts factory workers had woven into
fabric, worked their fields with a plow
manufactured in Illinois from steel produced in
Pennsylvania (from iron mined in Michigan!!), and
ended their Sunday meal by drinking Venezuelan
coffee after enjoying an apple pie made on an
Ohio stove from the fruit of their backyard
orchard mixed with sugar from Cuba and cinnamon
from Ceylon. (310)
32Country and City, Farmers and Laborers Coevolve
- Basically, the midwestern industrial economy was
based on agro-industrialization a process
whereby indigenous regional industries served
local agricultural and consumption markets
without competing against already established
eastern textile and other high-value goods
industries.
33The Fire kept from the Plains, it did in the
City
- 1871 Almost three hundred people lost their
lives, a hundred thousand were left homeless, and
nearly 200 million in property was destroyed. - The entire downtown was laid waste in a single
night. - The fire may have destroyed the downtown, but it
left Chicagos essential infrastructure intact.
Most important, the vast network of rails
pointing towards Lake Michigan could hardly be
touched by so local an event.
34Up, out and the Class-ic Burbs
- Rising land values encouraged architects to
design ever taller structures to exact more rent
from the expensive property upon which they
stood. The same rise in land values that sent
downtown buildings soaring skyward also made them
too expensive for residential use which meant
that working class neighborhoods moved out as
well.
35The Squeeze
- Those who suffered the worst social and
environmental hardshipswere invariably the
working families whose limited resources kept
them inside factories by day, and downwind and
downstream of them by night. - The higher the downtown became, the greater the
horizontal spread of the residential
neighborhoods that housed its daytime
inhabitants skyscraper and suburb created one
another.
36Burbs Country Look, City Culture No Work
- Suburbs Neither the work of the farm nor the
work of the city was supposed to happen in
them, save for the work women did in caring for
their children, and the work domestic servants
did in keeping the households and tending the
grounds of this park-like landscape.
37NOW, whatdwedo?
- Many noticed that the country had neither the
wealth, NOR THE POVERTY, of the city and its
suburbs. - Is it true that the rise of (sub)urbanization
coincides with class polarization? If so, how
does that relate to race politics? If so, have
the benefits been worth the costs? If so, for
whom have they been worth it and for whom not? - Would an appropriate solution to this be to
return people to the land?