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Technology, Markets, Space. Lessons from the Calumet Region. Myths of the Information Age. Geography is irrelevant Race, class, and gender are irrelevant Frontiers are empty places
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Technology, Markets, Space Lessons from the Calumet Region
Myths of the Information Age • Geography is irrelevant • Race, class, and gender are irrelevant • Frontiers are empty places • Persons are powerful as individuals: My Yahoo! Where Do You Want To Go Today? Free Corporations and a Wonderful Future will be Created
Network Society The space of flows is made up of discontinuous locales whose function and meaning depend on their positioning and repositioning in a network of instrumental flows. Manuel Castells, sociologist of the Informational City
Thesis Market incentives force corporations to transform environments into sets of manageable resources. Unorganized individuals are not free to resist this logic. Social worlds created by unfettered markets are not the kind we would choose to inhabit.
Making Flows Visible Myths of the Information Society Make Flows Invisible History of the Calumet Region Make Flows Visible
Steel as Key Technology There is a mystique involved in the steel industry that makes it a symbol of economic strength all over the world. The great industrial economies that emerged in the nineteenth century were built on steel, and wars were won with it. For more than a century, both politicians and economists have regarded steel capacity as a measure of industrial progress and a source of geopolitical power. Business Week, 1977
Networks of the Calumet Region The city of Gary was conceived in the counting rooms and born in a jungle. It was nursed on faith and schooled in the fiery furnace of toil. It is peopled by men and women of every living tongue and creed, while in marts of the world, it stands as the horoscope of good or evil symptoms in the final aspect of Christendom. As steel goes, so goes the world, and Gary is its prophet.
Calumet Region Parallels • Frontier • Global Village • Leading Edge Technologies • Economic Driver • Largest Concentration of Industry on the Planet
Promise of the Calumet Region Optimistic observers hail Gary as the ‘City of the Century’ an industrial utopia made real by American technology. “Gary will be the most picturesque city of them all” wrote one booster wrote in 1909. Another admirer in 1911 wrote that Gary presented the most wonderful record of growth, in the shortest period of time, of any town or city in the civilized world. Raymond Mohl, Steel City
Myths of the Calumet Region We may assert that the Region has indeed produced its own myth, that of a cultural desert peopled by blue-collar workers living in the midst of polluted skies, garbage dumps, and violent ghettos. Richard Dorson, oral historian, Land of the Millrats
Regional Flows • Access to Customers • Access to Chicago Rail • Access to Iron Ore • Access to Coal • Access to Labor • Access to Empty Land • Access to Water
Dunes Environmental Flows • Boundary of Eastern Forest and Western Prairie • Boundary of Northern Boreal and Southern Warm Climate • Varied Local Topography Third among all national parks in biodiversity. Over 1300 prairie, deciduous forest, bog, rainforest, desert, and arctic plants in only 13,954 acres.
Jens Jensen The dunes of northern Indiana are one of the great expressions of wild beauty in this country. They are the greatest of nature’s expressions of this beauty in the Middle West and as a type of landscape they are unequaled anywhere in the world
Birthplace of Ecology A keen observer, walking inland from the water’s edge, could trace a pattern of ecological succession in space which paralleled the development of vegetation in time. The engine of progress was not so much competition between individuals as experiments by pioneering associations of organisms in more adaptive reciprocal relationships with one another and their environment. Dr. Henry Cowles, 1896
Culture of the Calumet Region • Biology: Henry Cowles Founds Ecology • Sociology: Chicago School+Biotic Principle • Architecture: Prairie School, F. L.Wright • Poetry, Painting, Sculpture
Invisible Flows Without organized resistance, corporations face imperatives which force them to transform their environment into a set of resources. Short term profits are maximized at the expense of social welfare.
Social Disasters Early Decisions Maximized Corporate Resources at the Expense of: • Poor Urban Form • Social Segregation • Structural Racial Inequality • Environmental Devastation • Labor Crises
Original Gary Urban Form • Social Segregation • No Lake Access • Uniform Grid • No Public Spaces • No Green Spaces • No Diagonals • Rail Disruptions
Because of U.S. Steel’s limited concept of town planning, two strikingly different Garys emerged: one neat and scenic, the other chaotic and squalid. Planned Social Segregation
1937 Zoning The impact of HOLC in Gary, it should be clear, was to consign the city’s black sections, as well as adjacent white sections, to a future of physical decay and increased racial segregation.
Grand Calumet 1900 Historically, the Grand Calumet River supported highly diverse, globally unique fish and wildlife communities.
Grand Calumet River Pollutants • Among the most widely polluted waterways in the world with 423 hazardous water sites listed under RCRA. • Entire bottom is composed of minute iron particles. • 90% of the river’s flow originates as municipal and industrial effluent. • PCBs, PAHs, Mercury, Arsenic, Copper, Cadmium, Dioxins, Chromium, Lead and 3,100 pounds of Cyanide. • Not even sludge worms can survive, lab animals exposed to sediments had a 100 percent mortality.
Calumet Region Air Pollution This is not to be a smoky city, modern methods enabling the extraction from the smoke of all gases and fumes. 1908
US Steel Air Pollution U. S. Steel’s Gary Works is the single largest air polluter in the United States.
