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Nature

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Nature s Metropolis: A Lead-in For Environmental Inequalities 19th C Chicago, IL, first, then 20th C Gary, IN Alan Rudy Spring 2002 ISS 310 Thursday, February 15 – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Nature


1
Natures 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
2
Nature 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.

3
Country 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)

4
The 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)

5
TURNERS EVOLUTIONARY STAGES OF SOCIETIES
  • Pastoral Stage
  • Sparse Farming
  • Dense Farming
  • Cities and Factories

6
City 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.

7
Why 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,

8
Market
  • 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.

10
Railroads 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.

11
Railroad 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.

12
Temporal 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.

13
Capital 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).

14
It all comes together
  • See? Social AND Ecological relations utterly
    transformed in the process of the coevolution of
    country and city.

15
Trade, 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..

16
Prairie, 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!!

17
Ecosimplification
  • 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)

18
Sacks, 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.

19
Sacks, 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!!!!

20
Oops, 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.

21
Sacks, 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

22
Commodities 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).

23
Water, 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

24
Lumber 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.

25
Eco-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.

26
Eco-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.

27
High 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.

28
Disassembling 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.

29
Cold 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.

30
Meatpackers 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.

31
Interconnected 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)

32
Country 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.

33
The 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.

34
Up, 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.

35
The 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.

36
Burbs 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.

37
NOW, 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?
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