From Relay to Remainder
Chicago’s Passage from Imperial Hinge to Suspended Node
The City of Chicago did not emerge organically. It was engineered as a logistical node within a settler-colonial Empire — deliberately situated and scaled to serve as the inland hinge of U.S. imperial coordination. Unlike its European predecessors, whose empires extended through far-flung colonial outposts, the United States built its global hegemony by consolidating its continental interior into a self-integrated platform of extraction, circulation, and command. Positioned at the convergence of river, rail, and lake systems, Chicago became the operational core of this internal infrastructural consolidation. It was here — more than in any coastal capital or frontier outpost — that the United States formalized its mutation of Empire: from the brute force of industrial metabolism to the cybernetic abstraction of logistical capitalism.
The former Acme Steel coke plant near 114th Street and Torrence Avenue.
To grasp the global system of domination we inhabit today, it is essential to distinguish between empires (with a lowercase ‘e’) and Empire (with a capital ‘E’). Individual empires — such as those of Rome, Britain, or the United States — are discrete historical entities: political, military, and economic instruments that wield power at particular times and places. Empire, by contrast, is the underlying system — a transhistorical logic of domination, exploitation, and control that transcends any single empire. It evolves by adapting to changing conditions, integrating regional systems of governance, and intensifying patriarchal, racial, and capitalist hierarchies to sustain its authority.
Empire is not static. It has grown from pre-modern patriarchal structures that were often localized and relatively “low-intensity” into a global, systemic force that wields the brutalities of capitalist war and racializing rule as accelerants of conquest and exploitation. This transformation — from fragmented patriarchies to the integrated global machinery of Empire — defines the long centuries of domination that have shaped our world.
Over time, Empire has reorganized itself through distinct but overlapping infrastructural regimes. In its earliest phases — Conquistador Capitalism — it relied on conquest and plunder: an architecture of territorial violence built by Genoese financiers, Iberian aristocrats, and ecclesiastical administrators. Extraction was secured through enslavement and forced labor, with racial hierarchy institutionalized as a tool of control. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch refined these mechanisms by merging finance and force into a corporate form — Trade Company Capitalism — militarizing trade and administering colonization through shareholder governance. The British expanded this logic into a global metabolic system — Industrial Capitalism — remapping the planet into circuits of raw material inputs and industrial outputs, coordinated through steam, rail, and imperial bureaucracy.
The United States introduced a new phase in this sequence: Logistical Capitalism. In this regime, the extraction of value was no longer centered on production per se, but on the coordination of movement — of goods, labor, capital, and information. Empire mutated into a circulatory order, and the domestic interior of the United States became its proving ground. With territorial sovereignty secured through the conquest of Native lands and the incorporation of Black labor under apartheid conditions, the U.S. state turned inward to build a coherent infrastructure of global command. Chicago became the infrastructural hinge of this transformation, as the United States leveraged its vast settler-colonial interior to construct a continental infrastructure that integrated North America and bridged the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, Chicago was deliberately developed as a strategic node for standardizing and accelerating flow. Situated at the convergence of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, and the expanding rail network, it functioned as a continental relay — linking East and West, North and South — within the expanding infrastructure of U.S. empire (lowercase e) and the emergent circulatory regime of Logistical Capitalism that would come to define Empire (uppercase E). Chicago hosted the 1883 General Time Convention, which introduced standardized time zones to discipline labor and synchronize scheduling. The Chicago Board of Trade pioneered futures markets that abstracted agricultural goods into speculative financial instruments. It implemented systems of bulk grading, warehouse receipts, and intermodal transfers that reclassified material goods as logistical units. These innovations did more than facilitate commodity circulation — they transformed the very coordinates of territory into capital. By coordinating the movement of grain, livestock, steel, and labor across the continental interior, Chicago inscribed itself into every major axis of U.S. empire’s domestic metabolism and helped prototype the infrastructure of Empire itself.
This coordination was racialized from the start. Following the collapse of Black Reconstruction in the South, the United States instituted a national system of apartheid: de jure in the South through Jim Crow, de facto in the North through zoning and real estate segregation, immigration and policing policy. Chicago became the industrial destination for displaced Black populations fleeing southern racial terror and the reimposition of coerced labor. The Great Migration brought millions to the city’s industrial periphery, where they were incorporated into low-wage labor markets and confined to segregated neighborhoods by zoning ordinances, housing covenants, and redlined financial boundaries. The city’s planning institutions, welfare agencies, and academic disciplines — most notably the Chicago School of Sociology — rendered these populations as objects of study and control, producing new methods for managing surplus life within the logistical city.
What emerged in Chicago was not merely a segregated population — it was a regime of racialized logistical capture. The city became a laboratory of Black captivity: not a redux of enslavement, but a structural condition in which Black life was administered as surplus within circuits of accumulation and control. This was not post-slavery freedom but a colony internal to the settler empire — a zone where the unfinished logics of chattel subjection mutated into new regimes of extraction, containment, and cultural appropriation.
Black neighborhoods were not simply dumping grounds for the denigrated and dispossessed. They were concentration sites of embodied surplus, where political neglect, cultural expropriation, carceral saturation, and infrastructural abandonment functioned as modalities of governance. These were not inert formations. They were dynamic matrices in which Black captivity and Black fugitivity operated as co-constitutive logics: the former organizing the spatial and economic management of surplus life, the latter generating practices that resisted the managerial logics of fungibility and disposability. What might appear as aesthetic excess — sonic innovation, kinesthetic improvisation, spiritual intensification — must be understood as infrastructural counter-production. The makings of Chicago’s Black musics — from Blues and Jazz to House and Footwork — did not emerge outside Empire’s circuits but operated within them at a tactical angle of deviation.
As U.S. global dominance solidified after World War II, Chicago’s logistical infrastructure was scaled to serve a planetary system. The U.S. absorbed remnants of the Nazi German Empire in the Euro-Atlantic and the Japanese Empire in the Asia-Pacific, redefining Empire as a circulatory system centered on itself and sustained by ports, shipping lanes, and transnational financial institutions. Chicago’s freight yards, stockyards, and commodity exchanges were embedded within these transnational circuits of accumulation. Under institutions like the IMF and World Bank, Empire extended its reach across the Global South through ports, pipelines, and payment platforms. Meanwhile, Chicago exported its infrastructural template: its highways, zoning codes, and retail logistics became blueprints for domesticating circulation across urban life. The logistical logic of Empire was not only sustained in Chicago — it was materialized through it.
Today, that infrastructure persists. Chicago remains one of the most economically “productive” cities on Earth, with a metropolitan GDP nearing $900 billion — placing it firmly among the global top ten. It also retains a demographic structure that sets it apart from other global cities: it is, by proportion, the Blackest among the world’s major economic centers. No city of comparable economic weight concentrates such a high percentage of Black residents. While the New York metropolitan area has a larger absolute number of Black people, its proportion is lower, and its Black population is more spatially diffused across boroughs, counties, and suburban zones. In Chicago, the density, historic significance, and spatial centrality of Black life are unmatched within any peer economy. This demographic presence — though shaped by decades of dispossession and demographic attrition — remains foundational to Chicago’s spatial and economic formation. The city was built to manage and metabolize racialized life, and its Black population remains structurally central to its design.
Yet the global system that once sustained Chicago’s logistical centrality is undergoing reorganization. China’s attempt to construct an alternative infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative — alongside expanding coordination across Eurasia in logistics and information technology — has begun to challenge the foundations of the U.S.-anchored global order. The Belt and Road remains incomplete, and its trajectory is constrained by geography itself: by the frictions of terrain, political instability, debt exposure, and ecological volatility. Nevertheless, it articulates a structural ambition — to displace the unipolar Atlantic-Pacific circuitry organized by the United States with a multipolar mesh that connects East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe through emergent land and maritime corridors of trade and technology.
In the face of this challenge, the United States has not responded by renewing its own infrastructural nodes. It has not reinvested in interior cities like Chicago. Instead, consistent with the logic of a declining hegemon, it has shifted from integration to disruption. Recognizing that it is easier to dominate by obstruction than by construction, the U.S. has embraced a strategy of trade wars, sanctions, proxy conflicts, and strategic destabilization of key regions along China’s logistical arc. This is not a failure of imagination — it is a calculated embrace of disorder as a tool of imperial maintenance. Within this strategic horizon, domestic infrastructure is deprioritized. Cities like Chicago are not retooled for inclusion in a future system; they are suspended, their capacities left underleveraged, their relevance presumed rather than renewed.
Chicago’s current condition must be understood within this context of imperial transition and infrastructural stasis. The city is not in collapse — but it may be entering a state of incipient disarticulation. Its freight yards, though still intensely active, operate under conditions of chronic congestion and aging inefficiency; its rail corridors, while structurally central to continental flow, are increasingly strained and slipping into relative peripheralization within emerging global logistics networks. Its public infrastructure remains burdened by fiscal austerity, and its surveillance systems have intensified — often aimed at managing populations increasingly marginalized within the dominant economic order. Investments in next-generation logistics, platforms, and AI are more frequently directed elsewhere — toward favored coastal tech hubs. Chicago remains a high-output economy, but its role as a logistical hinge is no longer structurally guaranteed.
This disarticulation is not an isolated occurrence. It reflects a broader pattern in the adaptive machinery of Empire: as its hegemon leans toward sabotage over renewal, interior nodes are neither fully decommissioned nor fully reintegrated — they are remaindered. Chicago’s systems remain operational, but their alignment with Empire’s dominant circuits appears to be fraying. What was once a relay is now at risk of becoming a residue — not solely due to internal dysfunction, but also because of a shifting imperial geography that no longer depends on its full activation.
What follows is not terminal crisis but unresolved transition. Chicago retains the material density of logistical centrality: its labor force, its transport grid, its financial institutions, and its industrial memory persist. But the coherence that once bound these elements into an integrated imperial function has begun to erode. The city now occupies a space of suspended utility — not fully repurposed, not yet obsolete — a node awaiting resolution in a system whose reintegrative logic is no longer assured.
To examine Chicago today is to confront the uneven rhythms of imperial mutation. Its condition is defined not by decay, but by increasingly strategic irrelevance: the repurposing of infrastructure for internal containment rather than global coordination; the diversion of public investment toward policing rather than logistical renewal; the slow detachment of its spatial and institutional forms from emergent circuits of planetary command.
Whether the city is absorbed into a new global arrangement or relegated to infrastructural afterlife will depend less on its internal capacities than on the geopolitics of the hinge: on whether the Belt and Road consolidates or fragments, whether U.S. sabotage succeeds or backfires, and whether cities like Chicago can recompose themselves amid the strategic neglect of their former centrality.
But Chicago’s disarticulation from Empire’s dominant logistical circuits is not merely a symptom of decline — it is a structural condition that opens tactical opportunity. As Empire deprioritizes its interior nodes and diverts investment toward disruption rather than integration, cities like Chicago become infrastructurally suspended: no longer central to coordination, not yet repurposed or abandoned. This suspension creates space — not of freedom, but of indeterminacy — where alternative forms of organization can be prototyped beneath the threshold of imperial attention.
This is the terrain in which maroon infrastructures can take root. Not as static blueprints for post-crisis planning, but as live systems built amid strategic neglect. The same infrastructures once designed to contain and coordinate racialized life — public housing, rail corridors, zoning regimes — now exist in partial drift, vulnerable to abandonment but also available for reappropriation. Their logistical logic is weakening. Their administrative reach is fraying. This is not collapse — it is remainder. And remainder is a resource.
The task is not to restore Chicago’s centrality within Empire. It is to convert its remaindered infrastructure into life-support systems that operate otherwise: systems that hold relation without relying on legibility, that distribute care without assuming scale. Chicago’s disarticulation is not rupture but aperture — for assembling urban life otherwise. And yet, this aperture will not remain unclaimed. With the Great Lakes holding roughly 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater, and Lake Michigan offering immense cooling capacity for water-intensive computation, Chicago remains on the horizon of planetary infrastructure planning. Its future is not guaranteed, but it is not forgotten. The remainder can be reclaimed — or rerouted.
