Industrialization on Chicago’s Periphery: Examining Industrial Decentralization, 1893–1936

Abstract

Industrial decentralization in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century is usually presented as a straightforward process in which central city firms built new factories on suburban greenfield sites. The conventional wisdom is that these sites were located just beyond the central city, or adjacent built up areas, on the urban fringe. The essay argues that this view of industrial growth on Chicago’s periphery fails to capture important nuances of capital flow and suggests expanding the current industrial decentralization models to include outlying industrial settlements.