The Ecology of Cities

I’m still flailing away at the penultimate chapter of my book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. The last month or so has been among the most hectic in my life as I’ve struggled to balance teaching, service, new opportunities, and old obligations. During this time, I’ve been chipping away at my book, but the chips are getting smaller and the coherence of the various chapters more tenuous. There will be distinct difference between chapter written pre- and post-COVID. A more creative author than I am would be able to make this a feature rather than a bug. 

In any event, here’s the final chunk of chapter 7 which ostensibly considers industrial archaeology, ruins, and cities. You can read earlier chunks of it here, here, here, and here. My goal today, between grading, course preparation, some reading, and a committee meeting is to file down some of the rough edges and then call it a chapter draft. On November 2nd, I start the next and final chapter draft. My deadline is January 31st for a completed manuscript. 

Cities provide particularly visible spaces for protests in the 21st century in part because they are epicenters of change in the post-industrial world. The mid-20th century role of American and many European cities as manufacturing centers that transformed raw materials into consumer goods has steadily declined in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The rise of global supply chains and distributed and just-in-time production practices has transformed both the urban landscape in the United States and Europe. The rise of suburbs, “white flight,” and the decline in tax revenue available to increasingly impoverished cities contributed to economic, regional, and racial tensions. As we have seen, cities such as Detroit or the South Bronx section of New York have become iconic as much for its industrial ruins and poverty as its once storied past as a manufacturing and cultural centers.

The decaying industrial landscapes of these cities form an appropriate backdrop to not only the economic and racial protests, but also environmental concerns. The incipient interest among historical archaeologists in the environmental impact of industrial practices and urbanization (e.g. Benjamin 2017 [2020]; Dawdy 2010). As Jeff Benjamin observed contemporary industrial ruins are not just a commentary on the limits of capitalism, but also an opportunity to consider ways to escape from the environmental legacy of our industrial past. Dawdy’s understanding of the ruins of post-Katrina New Orleans offers both new ways of seeing the city and disasters. When hurricane Katrina destroyed the levies holding back the waters of the Mississippi, the literal boundary between the city and river collapsed. The clean up and remains left behind after this disaster preserved the blurred line between the ordered space of the city, the devastation of Katrina, and the natural and political forces that constituted destruction and recovery. For Dawdy, the ruins revealed the inequalities in economic, social, and political power within the city that dictated which sites were rebuilt, when they saw attention, and how they were rebuilt. Ruins also cultivate the emergence of alternate forms of social and material relations as Anna Tsing (2014) has argued in her study of the matsutake mushrooms which thrive in landscapes produced by industrial logging and abandoned intensive agriculture. As Edensor (2005) and DeSilvey have observed among industrial ruins, these spaces blurred any number of social and ontological divisions that define our world (2005). The natural and the cultural, the industrial and the rural, the past and the present, and the neatly ordered and chaotic, all coincide in the space of ruins.

By blurring the division between the natural and the human, these critiques of ruins open onto a larger critique of the relationship between humans and their environment. While the archaeology of the contemporary urban world remains in its infancy, it seems inevitable that the thriving field of urban environmental history will exert a significant influence. The work of William Cronon, especially his epic study of Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis (1991), recognized the relationship between cities and their often expansive hinterlands. Rather than envisioning these connections as spokes on a wheel or a series of connections and nodes, the ontological blurriness that describes the character of ruins might likewise apply to the categories of cities and their hinterland. For example, A. Beisaw’s article on the archaeology of the New York City massive water supply parallels David Soll’s recent history (2013) of the network of watersheds, reservoirs, aqueducts, communities, agencies, and policies that bring New York its fresh water. The requirements and habits of the New York residents have shaped the landscape and ecology though dams, reservoirs, and watershed conservation designed to ensure the security of New York’s water. These efforts, however, have limited the opportunities among upstate communities to develop economically despite their access to lakes and natural space. Amahia Mallea’s work (2018) on the relationship between Kansas City and the Missouri River locates the city and its policies along the longest river in North America at the messy intersection of social, economic, and regional attitudes. The protests associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline’s route beneath the Missouri River not only reflected local concerns for the pipeline’s route, but emphasized the massive reach of the Missouri’s course and the diverse communities impacted should the pipeline become compromised. The dense web of infrastructure that allows contemporary society to function continuously redefines the character and extend of urban space and transgresses the limits of traditional demographic and administrative divisions. For example, Andrew Needham’s environmental history of Phoenix, Arizona (2014) goes beyond the blurry “Crabgrass Frontier” of the southwestern city’s suburbs and follows the high-current power lines to the coal mines and power plants on the Navaho reservation which made Phoenix’s Post-War expansion possible. Matthew Kingle’s environmental history of Seattle begins and ends with the journey of the Pacific salmon whose annual efforts to return to their spawning grounds invariably take them past Richard Haag’s Gas Works Park. The preservation of industrial ruins forms a backdrop to more recent efforts to restore the ruins of city’s waterways.