In 1951, when their national association last gathered in Chicago, geographers were mostly a bunch of guys who wore sensible outdoor shoes and talked about maps and rocks and the rural landscape.
This week, when some 3,700 geographers came to the Marriott Hotel on North Michigan Avenue for the 91st gathering of the group, Chicago was not only a centerpiece of the show but perhaps the most vivid illustration of how drastically the field has changed.
While some geographers are still fascinated by mountain gradients and alluvial plains, a lot more of them now look at things like sprouting urban high-rises and where humans dump their garbage.
Moreover, the guys now work alongside a diverse group of colleagues, including many women and racial minorities. The convention this week even sported a lesbian, gay and bisexual caucus.
“Now there is an immense amount of interest in what is called human geography and cultural geography,” said Ronald Abler, executive director of the Association of American Geographers.
“We study things like how cities are organized, how agricultural technology changes the landscape and how people migrate,” Abler said.
Chicago, it turns out, is the mother of all cities when it comes to urban geography.
“A lot of what our ideas about how cities work and what makes them work grew out of Chicago,” Abler said. “Chicago is a stage on which a great drama is being played out, and geographers are like a Greek chorus, talking about what it all means in human terms.”
Every morning during the convention, which ends Sunday, geographers have been boarding tour buses or descending into subways, fanning out across the city and suburbs, looking for changes in the urban landscape and the reasons behind them. Meanwhile, at the hotel, some 1,900 papers and lectures on a bewildering array of subjects have been presented in workshops and general meetings.
There was even stratum geographical humor: The name of the convention bar, where beer or soft drinks went for $1, was Ptolemy’s Ptap, after the geographer and astronomer who flourished at Alexandria around A.D. 130.
Some of the targets of the field trips, such as a foray into the old Stockyards neighborhoods, have been under scrutiny by urban geographers as long as any in the world.
Since 1903, when the University of Chicago began the nation’s first geography doctoral program, many of the city’s neighborhoods have served continuously as living workshops for urban geographers.
But other subjects were a distinctly contemporary product of the evolving field. Among them were gay and lesbian communities in city neighborhoods; the creation of urban blues music in Chicago; and women’s rise in the Loop from customer and clerk to the boardrooms.
“Gay and lesbian communities might not seem like an obvious area of interest for a geographer,” Abler said. “But in most large cities the gentrification process in many formerly run-down neighborhoods often began when gays and lesbians began moving in. Whenever the physical landscape is changed by a newly arrived group, geographers are interested.”
Which is not to say that there weren’t also a few recognizably conventional discussions for geographers, including the disastrous flooding of the upper Mississippi Valley in 1993.
George Carney, an Oklahoma State University professor known by his peers as the “guru of geomusicology,” in a way epitomizes the style and interest of latter-day geographers. While he teaches geography, his Ph.D. is in history.
“I suppose the correct term for what we do today is `cross-disciplinary,’ but down in Oklahoma, they call me a half-breed,” Carney said. “Half of what I do is geography, half of it is history.
“We look at a lot more than just the physical landscape nowadays. We look at the cultural landscape, too, anywhere the human imprint has been left on the Earth’s surface.”
On Friday, Carney delivered a paper on “Urban Blues: The Sound of the Windy City.” He has been tracing the origination of a separate blues music genre echoing the rhythms of city life. He traces the beginning of that music to the migration of Southern blacks to Chicago beginning in World War I.
A lot of attention at this week’s meeting is also being focused on the muscular new technologies that have radically changed geography. Maps as we have known them for centuries are rapidly being replaced by computer images, often generated by satellites in space.
Those maps, constantly updated with immense computer databases, comprise what is known as GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, which in 10 years has become a $6 billion industry. Several companies manufacturing GIS software are at the Chicago meeting peddling their products.
One company, for instance, is showing off a program that can instantly show firefighters and ambulance drivers the quickest route to the address of an emergency call.
The same company is touting an even more sophisticated instrument that maps the location of every fast-food vendor in a metropolitan area. Then, with a few keystrokes, it shows the likeliest location for a successful new fast-food outlet. The selection is based on demographics such as how many thousands of people between ages 15 and 45 live within a five-minute drive of a prospective new location.
“A map has always been the ideal tool for a geographer,” Abler said, “but in the last 10 years everything has changed as we have gone from paper maps to computerized mapping.
“It used to be that the United States Geological Survey maps could only be printed up every 20 or 30 years. Now they can update the latest data into digital data files on a daily basis, and they can custom-print a map on demand.”
But, with old political feelings finally laid to rest, just being back in Chicago is the biggest excitement this year for the geographers.
After the 1951 meeting, another was scheduled in 1969, but the association moved it to Ann Arbor, Mich., in protest of the city’s handling of war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
“We have a rule that we won’t go to the same city twice within a 20-year span for our meetings,” Abler said. “The emphasis is on field trips because it’s an opportunity for members who live elsewhere to see and study some things they don’t usually get to look at.”
What they have been looking at in the city and suburbs this week often have been things native Chicagoans might not know about, or even do their best to hide, forget or otherwise ignore.
One of 33 field trips offered during the week is “Toxic Chicago.” It tracks old garbage pits and cesspools of long-forgotten industrial waste.
The tour’s first stop was Adler Planetarium, built on land formed with discarded 19th Century garbage, ash and dredged-up lake bottom. It proceeded to now-forgotten garbage pits in Calumet Harbor, Indiana Harbor and the Calumet Park industrial area and ended in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.
“The tour visits locations illustrating past waste management practices that in some cases have produced long-term problems for modern society,” the association’s tour guidebook said.
Another field trip, “Chicago’s `Edge Cities’: An Evolving Urban Fringe,” toured such unlikely destinations as suburban Oakbrook Terrace and Wheaton’s Danada Square shopping center. Many of the conventioneers on their own simply boarded the subway, following “Chicago, Kitchen Window by Kitchen Window: A Self-Guided Tour of the Urban Landscape via the Ravenswood Elevated Line.”
“Chicago is such a marvelous laboratory for us,” Abler said. “Cities grow in concentric circles, with rings of land use and intensity showing up as they radiate from the core. With the lakefront bisecting the circle here, it’s like a crosscut of a tree, exposing the rings.”Geography
