Nature’s Metropolis:A Lead-in For

Environmental Inequalities

19th C Chicago, IL, first,then 20th C Gary, IN

Alan Rudy Spring 2002ISS 310 Thursday, February 15

Nature Made Chicago!…..?

Key Ecological Determinants of ChicagoRiver to swampy ridge between Great Lakes Watershed and Mississippi WatershedWhat 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.

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)

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)

TURNER’S EVOLUTIONARY STAGES OF SOCIETIES

Pastoral StageSparse FarmingDense FarmingCities and Factories

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.

Why Chicago?

Market in the MudLousy Harbor, Swampy Plains, High Water Table

Artificial CorridorsCanal, Railroads

Railroad TimeOvercoming Space and Time

The Logic of CapitalControl, “Variable, Fixed and Operating Costs,”

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 city’s eventual position in the urban hierarchy.” (62)

‘Tweener-ville

Eastern/Chicago urban businesses organized and managed rural capital in RR’s (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.

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.

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.

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 RR’s schedule efficiency instituted in the 1880s, federal law after WWI.

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).

It all comes together

See? Social AND Ecological relations utterly transformed in the process of the coevolution of country and city.

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..

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!!

Ecosimplification

Capital (invested in the land) + Technology (large iron and steel plows) + Timing (too early, native weeds grew back, too late, crop didn’t 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)

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.

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 RR’s needed, automatic machinery, the steam-powered grain elevators, to be economically efficient. Death to the sacks!!!! All this reduced to LABOR COSTS!!!!

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.

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

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 who’s 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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disassembling the Hogs of War

Cincinnati and the “disassembly line” – pre-Taylorization, scientific management and disciplineCincinnati’s disassembly line was appropriated, perfected and expanded in Chicago Chicago’s dominance over Cincinnati and hogs, as with Saint Louis and grain, was cemented by the Civil War. The army’s 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.

Cold Cuts

Winter cut and stored ice, transported quickly by rail, associated with Chicago’s 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.

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.

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)

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.

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 Chicago’s essential infrastructure intact…. Most important, the vast network of rails pointing towards Lake Michigan… could hardly be touched by so local an event.”

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….

The Squeeze

“Those who suffered the worst social and environmental hardships…were 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.”

‘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….”

NOW, whatd’wedo?

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?