Notes on Nature’s Metropolis

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

Ø  Chicago – shaping landscape and economy of the second half of 19^th century

Ø  Links between city and country

Ø  Broader ambition to explore century old economic and ecological transformations that continue to effect NA and the world

Ø  Commodity markets – few economic institutions more powerfully effect human communities and natural ecosystems in the modern capitalist world

Ø  To understand the ecological consequences of our lives – to take political and moral responsibility for those consequences – we must reconstruct linkages between commodities of our economy and the resources of our ecosystem

Ø  Great West began in Ohio River and Lake Michigan and extended to the Pacific Ocean.

Ø  ‘First nature’ – original, prehuman nature

Ø  ‘second nature’ – artificial nature that people erect atop of first nature

Ø  “crowded and artificial, it was a cancer on an otherwise beautiful landscape” – a distortion of city and countryside

Ø  The city helped define – essential to – what we fell about the country – close material ties

Ø  Isolating human life from ecosystems that sustain it

Ø  Boundaries walls – between unnatural and natural – wilderness and the city

Ø  Understanding cities place in nature

Ø  City of Chicago declared its independence from nature – audacious and fascinating

Ø  1871 – great fire symbol of human will over natural adversity

Ø  City was a magnet. Louis Sullivan :the primal power assuming self-expression amid natures impelling urge” The wonder of nature transformed

Ø  City is freedom from fear of nature – a liberation – being able to realise dreams without constraints of natural limits or close community

Ø  Herrick believed this was also a prison (freedom) to see ones world as a self-created place opened the door to self-achievement but denied any other creator, nature of god

Ø  Rural-Urban shares one underlying assumption – which is deeply problematic.
They assume that city and country are separate and apposing worlds, that their division outweigh their connections. That people can build a world apart from nature

Ø  The dilemma – whether we celebrate the city or revile it, whether we wish to ‘control’ nature or ‘preserve’ it – we unconsciously affirm our belief that we are unnatural

Ø   The two (urban and rural) can exist only in each other’s presence

Ø  Their isolation is an illusion – they need each other

Ø  Urban – rural, human – natural. Dichotomy.

Ø  Moral responsibility – all lives are embedded in a web of natural relationships – nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of human relationships that constitute our history

Ø  Natures metropolis and Great West are labels for a single region and the relationship that define it

Ø  By erasing the false boundary we can recover their common past

Ø  Post glacial migrations defined the regions vegitational geography

Ø  Grasslands, softwood and hardwood forests were all within reach

Ø  Natural markets – gravel stone rivers, lakes, clay grass tress

Ø  Humans and their labelling – natural and cultural landscapes began to shape into and reshape one another

Ø  Land had to be refined and reshaped / reordered

Ø  1930- lead mining major economic activity

Ø  1833 – black hawk uprising and large demographic change in population leading to cultural and economic revolution

Ø  Mad land rush – people brought lots for absurd prices – then 1937 banks called in loans – cities went into hibernation

Ø  Gambling urban future of Chicago of the boosters – visionaries as symbolic relationship between urban and regional growth

Ø  Jessup W Scott – influential booster in 1840

Ø  Natures metropolis would build herself – natures spurs city growth

Ø  Three natural advantages

1. Resources of the region centred trade

2.  Transportation routes – guide those resources to their natural marketplace

3. Global climate forces

Ø  Harbor and canal corridor for transport and urban growth

Ø  Cities were the stars around which town and country satellites would come to orbit

Ø  Scott believed cities main activity was to serve as marketplaces for their regions

Ø  Chicago the new empire – likened to Rome – Empirical metaphor.

Ø  Different to Rome due it growth from commercial power rather than the tyrannical power. Free commerce and enlightened demographic government

Ø  City and country formed a single commercial system, a single process of rural settlement and metropolitan economic growth

Ø  Turners Chicago rose to power only as frontier drew to a close. Boosters Chicago had been an intimate part from the beginning.

Ø  Urban – rural commerce was the motor of frontier change

Ø  When economy is organised around market exchange – trade between city and country are the most powerful forces influencing cultural geography and environmental change.

Ø  Von Thurens geography (zones)

1. Linking of city and country to turn a natural landscape into a spatial economy.

2. His theory had no place in time

Ø  Outside capital made Boosters prophecies come true

Ø  Frontier – freedom community family etc. Even these non-economic dreams presupposed a growing commerce link between county and city

Ø  Frontier and metropolis would shape the Great West together

Ø  As village became metropolis, so frontier become hinterland

Ø  Boosters ‘natural advantages’ – resources, waterways and climatic zones.

Ø  Disadvantages – river and lake refused to fulfil their destiny as harbor – the people took nature into their own hands

Ø  But nature met every new scheme with sand

Ø  Canals, railroads (seasonal nature) defined the corridors of commerce at least as much as first nature (lakes)

Ø  Due to glaciers autumn and spring were muddy and impossible to get market goods to Chicago

Ø   In 1849 city council ordered grade levels of streets to be raised from 4 feet to 14 feet.

Ø  People physically jacked building weighing thousands of tons

Ø  Others moved their building to other locations – ‘large frame and masonry structure rolling through the city traffic’

Ø  Chicago was bustling, farmers would come on 5 day trips due to the higher price they could sell their produce

Ø  By late 1940 Chicago had over 300 stores

Ø  Exchange of merchandise

Ø  Link west with east, rural with urban, farm with factory

Ø  Detroit, Buffalo and New York hidden foundation of Booster geographical determinism. Natural avenues of transportation play important roles in the future of shaping the city, but the pre-existing structure of human ecology  - second nature determines what routes and which cities develop most quickly

Ø  Railroad built in 1848 financed by rural and small town communities

Ø  Railroads are engines of growth and have a natural force in compelling the city back to economic health in the fire of 1971

Ø  Nature built Chicago through her artificer, man.

Ø  Railroads decreased the cost of distance band increased the value of time

Ø  The railroad became chief device for introducing a new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West.

Ø  1860 eastern terminus for every major railroad west of Lake Michigan. To get to the East coast had to go through Chicago.  

Ø  Chicago dominance over regional economy:

1. Shippers chose Chicago to move farm produce east as it was cheaper

2. Lowering prices that Eastern roads could charge outbound traffic

Ø  Western roads were built from and eastern roads to Chicago

Ø  Defined boundary between two railroad systems operating within different markets – Chicago became the link that bound the different worlds of East and West into a single system.

Ø  Became principal wholesale market for entire midcontinent

Ø  Became not the central city of the continent (hoped by boosters) but the gateway city to the Great west.

Ø  Karl Marx – ‘the annihilation of space and time’

Ø  Capital can flow freely – people and ideas follow it – enables cities to be built anywhere

Ø  Reduction of the importance of the place changes the relationship we have to the land

Ø  \capital has no boundaries of space or time

Ø  Capital (infrastructure etc.) can be mobilised and has transformed city development and rapid transformation of the global world