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.