Notes on Nature’s Metropolis continued

 William Cronin. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton.

Continued

Ø  End of 19^th century Chicago was temple of commerce

Ø  Behind each urban structure were the ghost of landscapes that had given it birth

Ø  Their bustling energy and sheer scale obscured the web of ecological and economic relationships in which they were enmeshed

Ø  This failure of understanding was twofold

Ø  City obscures both first nature _original nature) and second nature (human economy – constructed nature)

Ø  New human order superimposed on nature until the two became entangles

Ø  A hybrid system, as artificial as it was natural

Ø  Changing ecosystems and economies – product of the urban-rural system

Ø  Von Thunens ‘zoned landscape’ meant increasing specialisation among different ecosystems, production of each becoming concentrated on a few economically profitable species

Ø  Ecosystem dominated by hogs, corn and feedlot cattle

Ø  Hinterlands response to the markets where simplification of ecosystems in the direction of monocultures

Ø  Merging first and second nature was a shift from local ecosystems to regional `hinterland and global economy

Ø  Second nature – abstraction

Ø  Drawing a map of second nature means coming to terms with capital

Ø  Each industry had own pattern of trade, own characteristics, geography of debt, credit and capital

Ø  The more diverse and numerous its customer, the more varied and concentrated its market and hence more specialized its shops

Ø  Gateway city – by serving as the chief intermediary between newly occupies farm a and towns in the west and maturing capitalist economy

Ø  Combining railroads for open market encourage human migrations, environmental changes and eco developments that produced other great cities

Ø  Growth hidden costs that diminished Chicago’s competiveness

Ø  New technologies

1. Railroads

2. Electrical refrigeration

3. Diesel trucks

4. Paved rural highways

Ø  Each gateway city ended in similar ways as each encounters self-induced limits to growth

Ø   The city, frontier history of Great West is a story of metropolis expansion, growing market economy to distant landscapes and communities

Ø  This brought”

- Euro American migrations

- Alteration of ecosystems

- Remaking forest landscapes into farms

- Imposed new geography of second nature in which the market relations of capital reproduced into an urban-rural hierarchy – that frames human life