The Ordinancene
by Nina Olney, Jo Sabath, and Adrian Rucker
“The corners were marked using either wood posts or a corner tree, witnessed by two bearing trees. The bearing trees were blazed and scribed with bearings and distances given to the trees from the corner… The line measuring was done with a common two-pole Gunther’s chain,” (White 1983, 19)
In the quote above, White describes the original land survey as conducted by Thomas Hutchins in 1785, a foundational moment in which the spatial logic that unites the plantation, the city, and capital writ large became quite literally burned onto the landscape of the United States. 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 other people, these roads and railroads permit the transport of countless commodities, enriching many, including those early capitalists responsible for the creation of the grid. Understanding the functioning of the ordinancene requires looking through both the past and the present, using moments like the one White describes to understand the grid in its current form.
Cheap nature, one of the central “four cheaps” constituting the capitalocene as defined by Moore (Moore 2018), is foundational to the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. Moore uses the term “capitalocene” to describe a relationship between nature and economic growth that centers appropriation: value extraction that occurs outside of wage-based exploitation. In his own terms, Moore describes appropration as “the extra-economic mobilization of unpaid work/energy in service to capital accumulation… comprised [of] work, energy and life reproduced largely outside the cash nexus, yet indispensable to capital accumulation” (Moore 2018, 242).
In the case of the United States, the grid enables this process, allowing the Northwest Territories to be commodified and sold as a source of income for the young nation. The fate of so much of this land was to become perfectly rectangular farms consisting of, typically, one crop — an ecological fate described as characteristic of the “plantationocene” by Anna Tsing.
In the same article, Noburu refers to plantations as “the slavery of plants” (Haraway et al 2016) — it is worth mentioning, then, the use of chains as a tool for both the plantation owners in the south coercing “cheap” labor from enslaved people and for the surveyors forcing the vision of western rationality onto the land. Along with the farms came cities, transforming the landscape at a significant enough of a scale to become its own epoch, the urbanocene. Perhaps most emblematic of the connection between the urban form, the grid, and the Northwest Ordinance is our city of Chicago, famous both for its nearly perfect grid and its position as the “gateway to the west.”
The point of life diagram above attempts to illustrate the feeling that the grid has a ubiquitous presence in American life. In an attempt to reflect this, the diagram substitutes the standard form of concentric circles for a grid of overlapping images. Like the original point of life, the drawing takes component parts and intersperses them, creating a new narrative as the individual pieces interact with each other. Maintaining the form of the “core” on the outside and the “atmospheric” scale on the inside, the diagram moves between images representing aspects of the plantationocene and the urbanocene, with the capitalocene represented as an atmospheric centerpiece.
The corners of the diagram frame the image within the floorplan of a standard Chicago apartment, representing the presence of the grid even at the most intimate scale. This framing sets the stage for the way the spatial arrangement of the grid is integrated into daily life. It is from the vantage point of gridded space that we encounter the numerous other grids that make up the remainder of the diagram. The next two images in the outer core of the point of space diagram are archival photographs, one of a corn farm in Illinois and the other of a high-rise apartment building in Hyde Park. These images connect to the plantationocene and urbanocene respectively. The repeated form of the individual apartments in the building reinforces the narrative created through the floor-plan frame. The vast sea of corn in the archival image of the farm represents the monoculture synonymous with large-scale, capitalist agriculture in the last 200 years. Both a drive through rural Illinois and the following map of crop cultivation in Illinois confirm that this ecology remains widespread.
A similar phenomenon can be observed through the use of collage. Zooming in to the rural Illinois grid, one can see the fractal spatial logic of the grid at play. Grids contain grids and are contained by grids. Grids all the way down.
On its own, the crop distribution and the archival image of the farm do not immediately connect to the grid, but in light of the aerial imagery in the next layer of the point of space diagram, the gridded form of the farm becomes visible. Here, there is a direct connection to the Northwest Ordinance and the parceling out of land via the rectangular survey system. Once again, the grid as it applies to the farm and the city can be seen through the inclusion of the collaged map of Savannah, which will be explored in more detail below. This middle scale represents the form the grid takes in the minds of most people, as the layout of a cities and parcels of rural land.
In the center of the diagram, at the most “atmospheric” scale, the capitalocene is represented as a possible breakdown point for the grid, with exports from Illinois taking a tentacular, dispersed form in Gottheil’s representation (1975). However, placing this map at the center of these grids emphasizes the ways that the nebulous forms of capital both enable and rely on the gridded form.
Labor is another of Moore’s four cheaps and is often enabled by population influxes. ”The reserve army of labor can be treated as ‘cheap’ and ‘disposable human material’ because ‘physically uncorrupted’ workers can be found on the frontiers — overwhelmingly in colonial zones” (Moore 2018, 249).
This map traces major population flows to Illinois from 1850 to 2020 in order to provide some demographic context for the world in the wake of the ordinancene. The time period is split into three categories: 1850–1910, 1910–1970, and 1970–2020. The data was taken from the University of Washington’s great migrations project (https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Illinois.shtml). While migration to Illinois is undoubtedly more diverse and extensive than depicted in this map, simplifying population flows allows us to trace the geographic origins of major waves of migration and how they correspond to capitalogenic and urbanocenic processes. From 1850 to 1910, the majority of migration to Illinois came from other U.S. states, Canada, and Western European countries, particularly Germany and Ireland. Between 1910 and 1970, The Great Migration occurred, where large amounts of Black Americans from the south migrated to northern cities. This coincided with further immigration from Southern and Eastern European countries such as Poland, Italy, and Russia. After 1970, a substantial portion of migrants to Illinois came from Mexico and Central America, reflecting the newest frontier of labor sourcing in contemporary capitalism.
The evolution (or not) of urban form over the past century also illustrates the extensive logic of the ordinancene. This is an overlay map comparing current satellite images of Savannah, Georgia from Google Earth and a 1910 map of the same area. Former sites of plantations are highlighted in yellow. Interestingly, many of the former plantation sites are now industrial areas. While this is likely due to both plantations and modern industry benefiting from water access and would have been an undesirable land-use in densely populated areas, it provides an interesting thread for narrative continuity. The precise form that sites of production and value extraction takes changes over time, but they are informed by their past and often reflect it in surprising and profound ways. Overlaying the 1910 plan with the current view also shows the extent to which the grid has persisted in its most concentrated areas, as well as ways that the grid is morphed or abandoned according to geographical or social forces.
References:
Boryan, C., Z. Yang, P. Willis. 2014. US Geospatial Crop Frequency Data Layers. Third International Conference on Agro-geoinformatics. Augst 11–14, 2014. Beijing, China.
Gottheil, Diane. “How Illinois, an Inland State, Promotes Global Exports Business.” Illinois Periodicals Online at Northern Illinois University. Accessed May 6, 2022.
Haraway, Donna, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking — About the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81 (3): 535–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838.
Moore, Jason W. 2018. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (2): 237–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587.
White, C. Albert. 1983. History of the Rectangular Survey System. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management.
