An Epochal Atlas of Ordinance (a.k.a What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down?)
The grid, the field of space created by and central to the ordinancene, permeates the American landscape. One finds its straight lines and right angles in aerial imagery of the country’s monoculture mega-farms, the insides of its apartments, the streets of its cities, and the roads and railroads that connect its people to each other. In addition to the transportation of individuals, these roads and railroads permit the movement of countless commodities, enriching many, including those early capitalists responsible for the creation of the grid. Understanding the function(s) of the ordinancene requires looking through both the past and the present, analyzing scenes like the image of George Washington above, to understand the grid in its current form.
In past work, this team has analyzed the Ordinancene through a constellation of three key proposed epochs: Plantationocene, Capitalocene, and Urbanocene. In conjunction with the ‘Euclideocene’ and the ‘Anthroposeen’, these epochs help highlight the way that the grid has worked to structure plantation life, made legible American landscape for territorial expansion, and served as the foundation for urban development. These connections were then visualized using conceptual tools such as the point-of-life diagram, various maps, and a systems diagram. In this project, the team has focused on exploring the scenographic map as a tool to design an ‘epochal atlas’ that traces the effects of the grid through three key moments in history: the process of original land surveying, agriculture in the American Midwest, and the development of the Chicago River. This team aims to complicate the story of land as plot-and-parcel — a story that goes as deep as America’s founding — and dig into unstable ground. These moments of collapse, moments where the grid indeed “goes down,” are key to envisioning a future beyond the gridded landscape.
Towards A Scenographic Map
The scenographic map of the Ordinancene charts the movements between the three constitutive ‘scenes’ in two directions: an unconventional, falling motion through the establishment and the inevitable breakdown of the grid’s spatial and social logics, and a traditional rightward motion through time, slightly reimagined. The downward progression charts moments across time in which the grid becomes legible and subsequently falls apart, confronting the curved and complex lines of rivers and lakes, as well as un-gridded processes such as species exchange, urban gardening, and prairie fires. The map is optimistic, but not unrealistic, presenting both opportunities to move beyond the destructive consequences of the colonial regime that imposed the grid and phenomena that threaten to collapse the grid without offering future alternatives. Ultimately, the axis of breakdown demonstrates that since its inception, the grid may have succeeded in its task of preparing the land for sale and governance, but it never captured nor controlled all the forces that undercut those who used it as a tool of dominion.
The rightward march of time along the horizontal axis attempts to emulate the popular use of grids beyond the realm of physical space. Time, for so much of the scientific world, is synonymous with the horizontal “x” axis. Rather than subvert or drastically change this conception of the grid, we chose to play with this form to illustrate the ways that the grid exists even in abstract representations of the world. We hope that doing so may imply the ways that the grid is itself always an abstraction, only made real through human effort. On the scenographic map, time also becomes somewhat recursive, as it moves rightward both at the scale of the map as a whole and within each individual cene’s portion of the map. Capital, represented as the process of surveying the Northwest Territory in order to transform that land into a saleable commodity owned by the United States, is given an original position, enabling the creation of the monoculture plantations and the gridded cities that investors and speculators created on that land, after purchase. However, each of these processes has a temporal logic of its own, creating three progressions within a larger one. This recreates a common phenomenon of the grid: fractal scales, represented by the collaged map above.
Surveying and (Re)making Territory
The leftmost, and so earliest, section of the scenographic map attempts to represent the creation and breakdown of the grid across time at its inception, with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Two quotes provide context for the map. The larger of the two, “Congress was faced with the problem of how to develop this vast empty land,” comes from an undated video created by the Encyclopedia Britannica. The narrative in the bottom half of the section attempts to illustrate the inaccuracy of this common, violent notion that the land in the Northwest Territory was empty, waiting to be colonized. Rather than illustrate this concept by manipulating the images of Indigenous people without their consent, the map presents two timelines that undercut this narrative. First, the Indigenous practice of controlled burns to create and maintain the prairie is shown (Morrisey 2020). However, in the rightmost section of the map, an ash basket juts out from beneath the land’s silhouette. The basket was made by Jennie Brown, an artist belonging to the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi. This narrative demonstrates the grid’s breakdown by illustrating the false premises that informed it and reinforcing that the land constituting the Northwest Territory has been home to human civilization for far longer than it has been understood and shaped into a grid.
Brown’s practice connects to another narrative of grid breakdown represented in the map — the ecological threats to the land brought by colonization and the connection of the U.S. to global ecosystems. The Black Ash Tree, one of which Brown crafted into the basket, faces an extreme threat in its home of Illinois due to the Emerald Ash Borer on the lower right of the map. The insect, first seen in the U.S. in 2002, has “destroyed more than 20 million trees,” leading experts to discourage the planting of ashes in Illinois (City of Chicago). This environmental destruction, which poses risk to global food supplies and so is included as part of the grid’s breakdown, is also part and parcel of the creation and colonization of the grid. This is represented by the image in the top right, with the famous photograph of a man standing next to a mountain of buffalo skulls representing the grid functioning exactly as planned. Finally, the first moment of the grid is represented prior to the other narratives in the section with a photograph of surveyors in the act, using a gunter’s chain.
The River That Runs Through
The rightmost panel of the scenographic map highlights an original feature of the landscape that broke through gridded territory: the Chicago River. The river, first a stream that ran to Lake Michigan and later an engineering feat that redirected the flow of urban waste southwards, worked to reproduce the logic of the grid, becoming the cornerstone of one of the most important industrial corridors of the 20th century (Hill 2000). The city’s grid was also formed around the natural contours of the river, cementing the river as the axis on which the city’s neighborhoods flowed. The top left corner of the map illustrates these connections by fitting together images of grain elevators, early river barges, and neat lines of buildings. These images lay under a diagram of Illinois subdivided along the lakefront, representing the porosity between the abstract industrial processes and the violence of subdivision. This section of the scenographic map is overlayed with clipped images of oil spills and a man standing on a floating layer of river sewage in 1911 to convey the slow disaster of the river’s use as transportation.
The background of this scenographic map is a simple map of streams, rivers, and marshes in Chicago made using data from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and manipulated in QGIS. In place of the empty space of Lake Michigan, a map of the water table of the Chicago River is used to bring together the scale of the single river with the enormity of its hydrological connections.
Finally, the visuals at the bottom of the map focus on the possibilities opened up by embracing the chaos, the ‘wilderness,’ of the Chicago River. In an attempt to clean and revitalize the river, various governmental, scientific, and community organizations have focused on investing in the wildlife and biodiversity of the river. One project, the creation of a Wild Mile in the center of the city, works to create floating islands to give a home to native species whose habitats have been destroyed by industrial waste. Tunnels have also been dug to relieve pressure in cases of severe storms and to divert water through a treatment plant before being introduced to the river ecology. In focusing in on the shape of the river itself, rather than being guided by the gridded form that was upheld by the river for so long, these interventions are working to counteract this toxicity, resulting in increases in fish and plant species that have not been seen for decades. The images in this section almost spill off the page as a representation of the possibility that exceeds the grid. Only in looking beyond this form are there opportunities for new connections with nature.
Looking Towards Collapse
In asking, ‘What happens when the grid goes down?’ this project seeks to uncover the possibility that exists in the chaos of the un-griddable. Here, this project takes inspiration from yet another ‘cene’ — the Chthulucene and Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble,” (2016). By finding hope in the mess, one can better account for the bodies and emotions and overflows and excess that are weaved into human relations with the environment. Resisting the Cartesian impulse to make these relations legible, rejecting the mandates to survey and divide, one is more able to explore new opportunities for connection. This collapse of the grid is not some far-off possibility but rather a recognition that the grid is already collapsing. It is only by embracing this trouble that Haraway describes that one can find relief from the false promises of the grid and look toward real, actionable steps in environmental healing.
Works Cited
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