Shifting shorelines: Land reclamation and economic blackmail in industrial South Chicago

Abstract

This article takes an urban political ecological approach to a historical case study to show how corporations shape both material and economic landscapes to make them appear “natural” and stable when they are anything but. In the early twentieth century, Illinois Steel dumped waste into Lake Michigan at its South Chicago plant to surreptitiously expand its landholdings. The company leveraged a legal claim to the land—a claim that it materially produced out of slag—along with threats to move its operations to Indiana as bargaining chips to avoid further community pushback or regulatory intervention. This research modifies the typical chronology of “the runaway factory,” most often associated with the late twentieth century, to show that economic blackmail was instrumental to the process of industrialization itself. I treat the archive of South Chicago’s shifting shoreline as a muddy artifact of multiple and often contradictory social and political claims rather than a record of biophysical reality. By illustrating specific materializations of global capitalism in an unstable landscape, I argue that processes of disinvestment that transformed industrial communities over the course of the twentieth century were not part of a natural evolution but were contested, uneven, and actively pursued.

The socioenvironmental state and urban transitions: Eco-urbanism in China and the UK

“…At the time of writing, employment in clay industry is less than 2,000, and social deprivation associated with deindustrialisation is significant. The West Carclaze eco-town project was part of the process of envisioning transition away from the negative externalities of deindustrialisation, as part of the process of materialising processes of capitalist development in an unstable landscape (Taft, 2018), and responded to the changes in national eco-urban policy directions outlined above. It is in this light that plans for West Carclaze eco-town developed, stalled, and changed, in three distinct but interrelated phases stretching from 2006 to the early 2020s.…”

“…We analyse two eco-urban projects which are contextualised within significant national strategies to develop eco-cities and eco-towns, albeit on vastly different scales: the Chinese eco-city initiative (Chien, 2013; Liu and Lo, 2021), and the UK's eco-city programme (Tomozeiu and Joss, 2014; Warwick, 2015). While the Chinese context is characterised by strong state steering, while in the UK the overall governance structure is more decentralised and devolved, there are nonetheless cross-cutting questions about how eco-urban projects in different socio-political and economic settings can sustain, evolve and deliver urban sustainability transformations.…”

“…Funding for the four eco-towns that were initially chosen stalled, except for the North West Bicester eco-town, which was authorised to continue development to its original standards (Douglas, 2014). In this light, in the early to mid-2010s, much of the literature on eco-urban planning in the UK considered the eco-town initiative to have been largely unsuccessful (Douglas, 2014; Tomozeiu and Joss, 2014).…”

The frontiers of North America’s fossil fuel boom: BP, Tar Sands, and the re-industrialization of the Calumet Region

“…The rapid industrialization of the Calumet area has been recounted in many fascinating histories (Hurley 1995;Lewis 2008;Mayer and Wade 1969;Schoon 2016;Taft 2018;Walley 2013), and in this part of the article I focus on the transformation of the dunes and wetlands by Standard Oil as a process of appropriating value rather than degradation. Like the connections between Calumet steel foundries and hinterlands that provided key resources, the development of the Standard Oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana was also dependent on tight supply linkages between places.…”

Gaining Ground

“…Hailey 2013;Yilmaz 2018), domestic and industrial waste (e.g. Raybould et al 1987;Taft 2018) and, more rarely, the hulls of ships, and ballast (e.g. Dunlap 2010;Burström 2017, 61).…”