Nature’s Metropolis

"Nature’s Metropolis tells the story of Chicago’s relationship with the great American hinterland. It certainly shaped my understanding of the role that cities played in the 19th century. William Cronon tells this story through a series of commodities, from the timber of the early forest that came down through Lake Michigan, to the corn of Iowa that produced the pigs that were slaughtered in Chicago and then shipped back east. He tells the story of the triumph of Chicago over the earlier porkopolis Cincinnati, which was due to the fact that Chicago enabled America to access the wealth of the Iowa farmland, which was significantly more productive than the old hinterland of the Ohio River Valley. He also makes the case that even when cities form for utterly prosaic reasons, like the fact that when the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the Erie Canal were completed, Chicago became the linchpin of a great watery arch that spanned all the way from New York to New Orleans. Even though there are prosaic transportation-cost reasons why Chicago came to be, remarkable things happen when smart people get together in urban areas. He tells the story of the creation of the Chicago Board of Trade – where smart people are innovating because they are next to each other, because they actually see opportunities because they get ideas from each other. Cronon was originally a landscape historian. Though it is certainly true that the economic progress of the last century led to enormous changes in uses of the land, I’m not sure that I would lay the blame on cities. Cities certainly enable progress; they were part of that change. And any time we have development there are environmental challenges that must be managed. But people tend to do less damage when they are concentrated on less land. So I tend to think of the options facing America and the world not by comparing urban living to the pre-agrarian existence of Native Americans – I don’t think that’s a viable future even though it would be environmentally sensitive."