Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago

by Colin Fisher

In early twentieth-century America, affluent city-dwellers made a habit of venturing out of doors and vacationing in resorts and national parks. Yet the rich and the privileged were not the only ones who sought respite in nature. In this pathbreaking book, historian Colin Fisher demonstrates that working-class white immigrants and African Americans in rapidly industrializing Chicago also fled the urban environment during their scarce leisure time. If they had the means, they traveled to wilderness parks just past the city limits as well as to rural resorts in Wisconsin and Michigan. But lacking time and money, they most often sought out nature within the city itself--at urban parks and commercial groves, along the Lake Michigan shore, even in vacant lots. Chicagoans enjoyed a variety of outdoor recreational activities in these green spaces, and they used them to forge ethnic and working-class community. While narrating a crucial era in the history of Chicago's urban development, Fisher makes important interventions in debates about working-class leisure, the history of urban parks, environmental justice, the African American experience, immigration history, and the cultural history of nature.

Genres: Nature

248 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2015

Reviews

[Yeast]

This book has provided some insight that perfectly matches the topic I am currently investigating, namely, the interaction between urban (and peri-urban) green space and city dwellers.

Urban Green is a special historiography recording and analyzing how the concept of "nature" and its physical embodiment can play a role in the history of Chicago from around 1860s to 1930s, a time when rapid industrialization, huge amount of immigration, and shifting domestic and international politics all made this newly fledged metropolitan a distinct place.

The book subsequently introduced the different kinds of "nature" found in and around the city: the urban parks, the surrounding forest reserves, and the more distant national parks. How these places were utilized as settings for both social and natural pursuit therefore touched the labour, immigrant, racial, and environmental history of Chicago.

The author is especially gifted when delineating that, while "historical events" definitely didn't happen randomly, there was nothing that was inevitable. As historian, the author has not only illustrated the possibility of alternatives but also highlighted that people at those historical moments also understood that there should be alternatives. The chapter on labour movement nicely demonstrated this: the labours, the unions, and the employers have all intended to figure out, and probably negotiated, a strategy which may serve their ideal future well. Members in these respective groups may also have their own agenda, so the imagination about "future" must be constantly formed and reformed.

History, as the book articulated, is not only about past, but how people in the past, in a certain environmental, socio-cultrual, politcal, and economic context, envisioned the future and thus acted (though not perfectly according to their expectation), subsequently offering the fabric of which our current world was shaped.

[Emily]

A unique angle on history - Chicago's urban growth as seen via its parks and green space, or alternatively, the rise of American parks and leisure from an urban, working class perspective. It hits the familiar major points of pre-WW2 Chicago history but doesn't dwell on them too long; instead you get stories about company picnics, the city's first Boy & Girl Scouts, labor parades, and German beer gardens. Some especially fascinating bits include the story in the first chapter about an early "urban ranger" and self taught naturalist, and the way immigrants to the city built their identities around urban natural areas.

It's definitely an academic book - the author is advancing an argument and adding to The Literature rather than telling a story - so it's not always the most natural or entertaining reading even when the material is interesting. Worth a read as an added dimension to either Chicago or American nature history, if you're cool with scholarly writing.