\u201cHidden spaces,\u201d bioregional cultural identity, and suburban decay in the hinterland of America: On how ecology and environmental geography influence local resource extraction industries, which in turn creates boundaries between cultural regions and determines locations of wealth disparity.
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Map 1: The areas of urban influence over adjacent rural land, produced by Garret Dash Nelson in an influential 2016 study of urban influence over economic geography of nearby regions.
Map 2: By Claire Trainor of University of Wisconsin-Madison, combining the 7 major cultural region boundaries of Joel Kotkin with the urban megaragions recognized by Regional Plan Association.
Map 3: Human-created nighttime lighting (source).
All the stories I tell about the border region between Southern \nOregon and Northern California, to take one example, simply wouldn\u2019t \nexist if it hadn\u2019t been for the way that capitalist accumulation drove \nthe need for violent settlement, reshaped the area\u2019s basic hydrology and\n ecology, and then instigated a whole series of crises that wrecked the \nmining, timber, and farm industries. So the picture is then one where \nthere exists this lower class, working in the black markets, the grey \nmarkets, or on contracts fighting wildfires, for example, because this \nis really the only way to buy food and pay rent and pay taxes. It\u2019s not \nsome sort of lifestyle choice. What seem to be cultural peculiarities \nare actually rooted in this class experience. And at the same time you \nhave the formation of this other class of landowners and industrialists \nwho put forward a claim to \u201cwhite working class\u201d identity, but really \nthey\u2019re just using cultural signifiers to obscure the fact that they own\n the vast remainder of the land that the government doesn\u2019t already own,\n and the few mills and mines and factories that still run, and honestly \nmany of them are just living off income from farm subsidies and, like, \nan Arby\u2019s franchise near the freeway. But because the Bundys wear \nCarhartt jackets you get all these urban commentators talking about the \nrevolt of the \u201cwhite working class.\u201d Regardless of how it gets \ndistorted, though, you can see how a certain class character is \nbasically shaped by these conditions of production.
\nWhat I call the \u201chinterland\u201d is central to this simply because of how\n production has been changing. I said above that the book is a work of \ncommunist geography. The notion that class emerges from the character of\n production\u2014and that class is inherently conflictual\u2014is pretty clearly \npackaged in the \u201ccommunist\u201d part, but it\u2019s also important to remember \nthe \u201cgeography\u201d portion, because the economy takes shape in space. That \nmeans that class takes on a spatial pattern as well, and the conflicts \nthat arise from it become embedded in real territories. I don\u2019t mean \nthis figuratively, either, because for about a decade now it\u2019s been very\n fashionable for academics to use these geographic metaphors, explaining\n how concepts \u201cmap onto\u201d one another, or how ideas are \n\u201cterritorialized.\u201d What I mean is that there are factories and \nwarehouses and ports and rail yards out there somewhere, they take up \nspace, they tend to cluster and sprawl in certain patterns and certain \nlocations, and the people who work in them also live somewhere. So \nreally the focus on the hinterland is an attempt to puncture this \namorphous view of geography that we\u2019ve sort of intuitively absorbed, \nhelmed by the notion that the downtown core of the \u201cGlobal City\u201d is \nsomehow the real heart of the economy, since it\u2019s where the \u201cknowledge\u201d \nis\u2014whether because of its concentration of tech workers, producer \nservices, or the so-called \u201ccreative class.\u201d I\u2019m saying, no, in fact, \nthe heart of the economy is still the production, processing, and \ntransit of goods, and this largely does not take place downtown.
\n\nThe hinterland is basically the space that lies beyond the \nadministrative centers of the global economy, which tend to be centered \nin the downtown cores of (largely coastal) metropoles. Obviously, there \nis enormous variation in what this space looks like. But I use the word \n\u201chinterland\u201d to try to capture the idea that these places are not \nperipheral in the sense of being on the \u201cedge\u201d of capitalism and \ntherefore having relative autonomy, where self-sufficiency and \nsubsistence might be possible. They are fully dependent, subordinate to \nthese administrative centers. But their priority does differ: the \u201cfar\u201d \nhinterland is lowest in this hierarchy, suitable for the sort of things \nthat are best kept out of sight. At its best, it is defined by some sort\n of extractive primary industry (mining, farming, timber, etc.); at its \nworst, it\u2019s just a sort of abandoned zone, dominated by informal work \nand black markets, where small towns desperately compete with one \nanother to be the host site for a new prison or landfill. And it\u2019s \nimportant to note that these spaces don\u2019t necessarily map directly onto \nour intuitive idea of urban and rural. The far hinterland is certainly \nmostly a rural space, but it would include that deep rust belt decay you\n see in Flint, MI, for example. One part of the concept\u2019s utility, then,\n is to point out that the experience of poverty in rural Kentucky is \nactually not going to be that fundamentally different from the \nexperience of poverty in \u201cinner city\u201d Detroit\u2014the two will be distinct, \nbut both will certainly be far more similar to one another than to the \naverage life experience of someone born to a moderately wealthy family \nin Boston or Seattle. At the same time, you also have these islands of \naffluence in rural areas, which are usually either leisure centers (like\n Aspen, CO), or simply commuter exurbs, and these places have a much \ncloser relationship with the urban core despite their distance.
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\nPhil A. Neel, in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, discussing his recently published Hinterland: America\u2019s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018 - University of Chicago Press).
\nThis book is full of holistic analysis about the intersections of ecology, culture, and wealth disparity. This is a good book about how natural ecology/landscape produces distinct cultural regions, and a good book about the recent history and growth of major urban areas. I recommend it for anyone interested in bioregionalism, ecology in the US, cultural regions, regional Gothic, suburbia and urban planning, the Rust Belt, political geography generally, etc.