Treating the Metabolic Disorder of Modern City Life

Perhaps no American city rose so meteorically from farm field to industrial giant as Chicago. Just some sixty years after the city was first platted, the World’s Columbian Exposition brought travelers from around the globe to this dynamo, this behemoth of production. Smokestacks belched here and there, hogs were slaughtered by the thousands in the stockyards, and commodities were traded downtown. The glory of the World’s Fair and the beauty of Lake Michigan contrasted with the heft of freight ships and locomotives.

The great poet Carl Sandburg captured this strange city, at once industrial and agricultural, natural and not. Chicago, he said, was:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.

This dynamic of city and country, industry and agriculture, would in many ways give way to industry alone. The farms in and around Chicago began to shrink and disappear. Those who were connected to the countryside and knew how to milk cows or pull weeds grew fewer, as more and more were employed in places like the US Steel facility on the South Side. Today, industry itself is being supplanted by financialization, white-collar work, technological work, and the shuffling of papers. People become detached, disembodied, and far from the natural world that gave the city its birth.

All of this makes Chicago an interesting case study, with lessons for cities further afield. What happens as a city loses its connection to the land? Once lost, can it be brought back? In Chicago, people are beginning to realize that city and country, industry and agriculture, cannot be separated and that the one depends upon the other. While local food cultivation in Chicago all but disappeared in the middle of the last century, there are those who, in however small a way, are working to bring it back. It is necessary work, not just for this city but for all modern cities, if their fate is not to be the exploitation, and ultimately depletion, of the resources on which they depend.

The First Form of Culture

“The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized.” So argued the great historians Will and Ariel Durant in the beginning of their twelve-volume The Story of Civilization. Agriculture frees us up from the activity of procuring food as the central use of our time. It roots us in one place and provides enough surplus food in such an efficient manner that we have the time and space to attend to other things; it keeps us steady enough to build on the work of generations before. From the soil of agriculture springs not just corn and wheat, but reading and writing, artistry, architecture, and urban life itself.

Farms provide the necessary foundation for cities. But as cities grow, the distance between human settlement and the natural world that sustains it also grows, often fracturing the foundation on which the city’s existence depends.

Sociologist Lewis Mumford argues that the city has a metabolic relationship with the countryside, and that after the Industrial Revolution, the energy balance that made the city possible became increasingly unstable. Massive agglomerations of people needed more energy, food, and other resources, but also grew more distant from the wellsprings of those resources. At the extreme end of this pattern lies not just ecological disaster, but also a kind of dehumanization, where human beings are chewed up, metabolized, and excreted by the city.

Modern cities are in a state of metabolic disorder. As residents of the city become disconnected from their natural environment, the city’s health suffers, and, at the same time, the community loses sight of the world that nourishes it.

The Natural City

In its beginnings, Chicago, now America’s third largest city, was not so different from an ancient Mesopotamian village. It began, like all cities, with agriculture. A black Catholic settler by the name of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable famously built a farm at “Eschecagou” in 1790 and married a native woman named Kitihawa. The town didn’t really get going until 1829, however, when it was platted as a city and was home to around a hundred people. Its position in the heart of one of the richest agricultural regions on earth, with access to the Atlantic Ocean, presaged its global significance for food production.

With the opening of the Erie Canal and the Michigan–Illinois Canal, goods could exit Chicago in both directions to the sea: north through the Great Lakes or south down the Mississippi. It didn’t take long for schooners to begin puffing in and out of Chicago, and, indeed, only twenty years after the city was first platted the railroad came through, making Chicago the emerging transportation hub of the country. Warehouses and factories began to pop up, but what really made Chicago distinct was food. Food was being shipped all over the country and beyond. Food, food, and more food.

The city grew rapidly. From 1837, when the first mayor was elected, to 1858, it grew from 4,000 to 90,000. The city sped through the typical historical stages of city development. In just a few decades, Chicago went from primitive frontier fort to agricultural village to regional center to global city. Europe’s poor, derelict, and hopeful came flooding in: Irish fleeing famine and disease, Dutch, Italian, Germans, and Swedes, a typical Midwestern mishmash. These European peasants brought their farming ways with them, and they maintained Chicago as a hinterland farm until the early twentieth century, when the city became, like all other major cities, uprooted from the land.

As recently as the 1920s, Chicago had truck farms (farms that trucked local produce to local markets daily) within its city limits. A 1924 Department of Labor study by Dorothy Williams Burke gives us a wonderful glimpse into the shape of truck farming in the Chicago area at that time. In the neighborhood of Chatham, now populated by chain supermarkets and strip malls along Interstate 94, a set of three farms once served produce to the Chicago area. Further south, but still within Cook County, there were four additional farms near South Holland. They grew sugar beets and asparagus with local workers as well as foreign migrants. Women from within the city were employed on these farms as well, something hard to imagine in our own time. Other farms crowded the north end of town and the northwest portion of the county. The scope of what was referred to as the truck farming area was within five miles of the city limits. In the northwest neighborhood of Jefferson Park, seasonal and occasional workers would gather in the morning to be picked up by truck farmers for harvesting, weeding, or planting work.

The notion that the city needs agriculture within it is an old one. At the turn of the twentieth century, social reformers were already coming up with the notion that an urban farm in a poor area could provide the underprivileged with quality food as well as a sense of purpose and ownership.

Truck farming in Chicago also developed in ethnic enclaves and among immigrant communities, not dissimilarly from the way that cooperative truck farming and floriculture emerged among Japanese communities in California. Swedish communities began truck farming in Chicago as early as 1855, when Swedes settled in North Park. At that time, proximity to the urban center was advantageous both in terms of marketing produce and of getting provisions and supplies from the city. These farms remained after North Park’s annexation into the city, at least as late as 1910. North of North Park was an enclave of German truck farmers as well. After the Civil War, Dutch immigrants were farming in what is now Englewood, remarkably, even pasturing cattle. By the 1880s, however, Englewood was already urbanizing. Yet, until the early twentieth century, Dutch farmers were active in the western suburbs, the southwest side of the city, and the area around the village of Summit. These farmers served a variety of street markets, like the one located at 71st and State Street, West Randolph Street, and West Water Street.

Truck farming provided food and income to the urban poor. A Chicago Daily Tribune article paints the picture of a fascinating early experiment in what has become a fashionable cause today: the social justice-oriented community garden. “The greatest truck farm in the world may be seen inside the city limits of Chicago within the next few years if the Austin community garden experiment has the desired result,” wrote the reporter, “a farm that will produce more than $1,000,000 a year for the poor of the city…. Mr. Swits of the Austin YMCA started the Austin Community Gardens with the intention of teaching the children how to cut down the cost of living by raising vegetables…. They are taught to keep accounts which show what the seeds cost them, what they received for everything they sold, and what the vegetables used for the family were worth.” It is not clear what became of the Austin community garden, but the glimpse into the motivation for this truck farm is a fascinating one, and, just as interesting, today there is a similar experiment, though smaller in scale, being conducted in the same area, where residents have taken to gardening in an abandoned lot.

Hinterland Farming Then and Today

Today in Chatham, a neighborhood on the South Side, you’ll find an interstate cutting between big box stores in the heart of the area. Not too long ago, in the 1920s, there was still a farm here. As in many major cities in America, refrigeration heralded the end of urban farming. Other developments in technologies for transporting and preserving food meant that the need for things to be grown close at hand diminished, and locally produced food became more expensive than food produced at scale by larger companies. At the same time, as farming was mechanized, more people moved to the cities, which meant that the space once occupied by hinterland farms was bought up and turned into housing developments. The city that always had one foot in the country was swallowing itself up in its own growth.

William Cronon in his famous book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West talks about being motivated to write by the fact that too often today we see nature and metropolis as totally distinct and disconnected. So often we talk about the urban versus rural binary, whether we are urbanites talking politically about those in the country, country folks talking about the corrupt life of the city, or environmentalists drawing a sharp line between man and nature. Cronon is right that this is how things have become, and he wants to redraw the connections to show that city and country are intimately connected. The country is shaped by the needs of the city, and the city is shaped by the produce of the country. This reason this has been forgotten is that as the city has grown, agricultural markets have consolidated to serve it.

Truck farming finally died in Chicago proper and its immediate environs in the 1940s and ’50s due to the increasing land prices that resulted from urbanization. It simply didn’t make sense to keep land as farms that could be used for high-value homes or even large apartment blocks. As the city expanded, this became the case not just for Chicago, but for all of Cook County and beyond. The rise of supermarket chains in the 1950s brought with it distribution centers connected to supply chains that drew from farms across the country. These stores were no longer sourcing from local farms, and the local farmers, wholesalers, and street markets went out of business. A few farms clung on selling produce direct to consumers, but this was not a viable economic position in the face of the expanding city and rising land values.

The Return of the Farmers’ Market

Street markets, local grocers, and farmers’ markets were so far out of fashion by mid-century, that, in the 1970s, a paper could be published entitled “Farmers Markets in the United States: Functional Anachronisms.” The scholar Jane Pyle argued that a farsighted individual as early as the 1890s could have foreseen the doom of the farmers’ market in the era of technological development that was occurring. “Over the years, the market has been stoutly defended,” she wrote, “by those who see in it old-fashioned virtues of individuality and direct connection with Mother Earth, and has been attacked by those who see in it an unwarranted subsidy of inefficiency in small-scale distribution. It is fondly remembered by those who think it no longer exists, and is faithfully patronized by those who prefer the quality of freshness over quantity, or even over price.”

But things were not as dire as they seemed. The rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, a growing skepticism of the health of foods that had been grown with harsh chemical interventions in the form of pesticides and herbicides, and a desire for connection to “Mother Earth” meant that farmers’ markets and natural foods grocers would indeed have a future.

Today, in fact, even the supermarkets go outside of their traditional supply chains in order to meet a growing demand for local foods. If a customer should walk down the aisles of Whole Foods, she will be greeted by stickers, posters, and banners pointing out the foods that are locally sourced (although Whole Foods’ definition may be loose, since products produced as far away from Chicago as central Wisconsin or Iowa are labeled as “local”). Even Wal-Mart, often seen as the paradigm for the faceless, placeless national grocery company, now features prominent displays of locally sourced tomatoes, sweet corn, and the like from time to time.

Still, the most prominent place for modern hinterland smallholders to sell their goods is the farmers’ market, and the upswing pondered by Pyle really did occur as activists, small farmers, and suburban women worked to spark a local produce movement in the 1970s. Farmers and activists were looking for fair prices. Women, often mothers, were looking for healthy and fresh food to feed their families, and activists were working toward ideals of environmental sustainability, communitarianism, and social justice. The rise of farmers’ markets in the United States from the dearth of the fifties through seventies is remarkable, although slowing somewhat in the last several years. Accordign to one report, in 1946, the United States was home to 499 farmers’ markets, but also home to many independent, small grocers sourcing from smaller farms. By 1972, this number had fallen to 342, despite a hugely growing population. This, however, was the trough, and quick growth was seen in the following decades. By 2018, farmers’ markets had seen more than 2,500 percent growth since the 1960s, with around 8,700 markets nationwide.

Urban Agriculture’s Return

On the far south end of the Chicago metro is a little suburb called South Holland, named by the Dutch who settled there many decades ago. On the edge of South Holland there remains one farm, run by Kevin and Molly Gorman. This farm has been in their family for six generations, and Kevin’s father sold most of it to the developer who built the familiar suburban homes that stand opposite to Kevin’s.

Kevin has retained the almost stereotypical old Chicago accent that has all but disappeared in much of the city. He grows vegetables for the farmers’ market on 61st Street in Woodlawn, up by the University of Chicago. The number of these markets has expanded in recent years as Chicagoans have followed the general trend of turning toward local, more organically produced foods. Other growers come to the 61st Street market all the way from Michigan or Wisconsin, pointing to the dearth of small farms near the city. “Near the city” as the Gormans are, they are still over an hour’s drive from downtown.

The notion that the city needs agriculture within it is an old one. At the turn of the twentieth century, social reformers were already coming up with the idea that an urban farm in a poor area could provide the underprivileged with good, quality food as well as a sense of purpose and ownership. Today, there are new urban farms popping up in some of the very same spots where historic farms stood.

Healing the metabolic rift between city and country, however, will take more than a few farms scattered here and there. Phillip Bess, along with his colleagues and students at Notre Dame, has reimagined Chicago as a higher density city, with mini urban centers radiating out into the countryside, such that farms and city are never far apart. While implementing this sort of vision may not be feasible for big cities like Chicago (it’s hard to see how the mass of existing development could be moved or reshaped in this way), perhaps the ideas could be integrated into new developments.

At the same time, there are plenty of empty lots in American cities. In Detroit, some thirty percent of the city has now become wooded. Most towns do not have the sort of empty space that Detroit has, but they will have some empty lots. These are eyesores and blights on a neighborhood, locations for garbage and illegal activity. If cities could work to incentivize the purchase of these lots, or purchase them publicly, to turn them into urban farms or gardens, they would be transformed into productive, healthy food sources and jobs for the people who work them.

In addition to these practical benefits, and perhaps even more important, would be that people in the city could reconnect with the agriculture that sustains them. This would happen not only in virtue of understanding the food system, but also in making it possible for them to more clearly imagine the environmental impacts of the city.

The story of urban development does not have to be the story of leaving agriculture behind. It could be that agriculture is not just the beginning of culture and the historical foundation of the city, but essential to its survival and the key to its future thriving.