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?