Recent work on the geographies of infrastructure has emphasized the role that time and temporality play, often in terms of a promised future that a specific project will bring about. Whether or not the infrastructure is actually built, or how long it takes to be built, it still shapes understandings of place and space. In other cases, infrastructure might splinter time and space, producing non-linear temporalities through interactions with people and places near that infrastructure. Much as a highway overpass separates different speeds and types of mobilities above and below, infrastructure can sort populations into connected and unconnected.
However, there are other ways in which temporality is sorted through infrastructure. In particular, the reuse of infrastructure may relegate it to the past and old ways of moving, or integrate it into present-day mobilities and even point the way towards the future. In this paper, I examine the Illinois Waterway and the Illinois & Michigan Canal as two parallel waterways intersecting the Chicago metropolitan area that illustrate how the reuse of infrastructure sorts out places and modes via different temporalities. At the eastern end of these waterways was one of the early industrial neighborhoods of Chicago, processing the raw materials that entered the city on the canal. Today, this continues as an important site for the new industries that drive the region’s economy: warehousing and logistics. On the other hand, the western reaches of the I&M Canal are now spaces of recreation. The canal’s designation in 1984 as the first National Heritage Corridor in the U.S. officially demarcated this infrastructure as of the past—foundational to the region’s and the nation’s history, but today only of use for recreation, not transportation. This paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for sustainable transport of both people and goods.
Mots clés : temporality|infrastructure|water|canal|industry
A104440JC