City of Wood is a study of the relationship between San Francisco and its extractive hinterland during the transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism. It takes inspiration from William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), an influential history of the intimate but invisible links between a developing urban center (Chicago) and its commodity-producing countryside. There are notable similarities between the two books, as well as meaningful differences. Where Cronon traced the routes of multiple goods as they moved into Chicago, ruminating on the economic abstractions produced along the way, Buckley moves back and forth along the supply chain of a single item—redwood lumber—and focuses in particular on capital’s built environments. Where Cronon emphasized urban capital’s centripetal power and the environmental degradation of the periphery, Buckley is interested in the social history of space in both urban and extractive settings, making the case for a more “reciprocal” relationship between the two (266). The redwood lumber industry, Buckley argues, produced its own spatial formation—a “city of wood”—that embraced city and hinterland in one “regional industrial space” (17).
Buckley traces the formation of this industrial space by integrating spatial theory and architectural history. In eight chapters, he examines the history of redwood lumber through changes in workers’ neighborhoods in the forest, city, and company town; in management’s shops, offices, and mansions; and in the mills, docks, and yards along lumber’s supply chain. These structures, Buckley argues, comprised the “vernacular” architecture of industrial capitalism. With this framing, Buckley urges architectural historians to focus their attention less on elite architects and more on this “vernacular”: the structures that, following the tradition of social theorist Henri Lefebvre, undergird the “every day” production of space (13).
In keeping with that focus on social relations, City of Wood also integrates spatial analysis with the study of labor, business, and technology. Buckley examines the history of workers as they cut down, moved, unloaded, stored, and processed redwood lumber, forging supply chains that would build up the city and transform their own experiences of space. He also examines the history of capitalists as they struggled to overcome the cutthroat competition of the nineteenth century and ultimately to integrate and bureaucratize in the twentieth. When capitalists reorganized themselves and invested in new technologies, they transformed not only their own institutions and production processes but also the cultural geographies of the city and the countryside. Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era will find familiar themes in this story. But there are also fresh insights in the ways that Buckley teases out the spatial implications of resource extraction and capitalist development. For example, Buckley describes how the fragmentation of the hyper-competitive lumber industry in the nineteenth century was mirrored in how the industry occupied space in San Francisco. Small firms shared lumberyards along the waterfront and clustered their workshops together south of the Market district, surviving lumber’s booms and busts by circulating knowledge among themselves. (Here Buckley draws on the concept of “networked specialists” [131] from business historian Philip Scranton’s Endless Novelty [1997].) Whatever office work they did to administer their business was performed in “shacks” near the docks (144). Corporate integration in the early twentieth century changed all of this because it altered the spatial formation of the industry. Well-capitalized firms now moved their accounting, distribution, and marketing functions into tall office buildings downtown, creating a physical separation between office and waterfront workers. Social stratification was thus in part a spatial stratification, which was reinforced by the development of new office cultures, replete with their own distinct aesthetics.
Corporate integration transformed space as much in the hinterland as in the urban center. From their downtown office buildings, corporate decision makers embraced economies of scale—and avoided the city’s burgeoning labor movement—by removing warehouses and production facilities from the city to be closer to the wooded interior. There they invested in new logging technologies to accelerate the pace of extraction, thus fueling mass production as the supply chain shortened. The forest now began to develop some characteristics of the city, as companies transformed makeshift worker dwellings into more permanent mill towns. By following lumber production from the forest to the city and back again, Buckley attests to the always-intertwined relationships between exploitation in the “resource periphery” and the “architectural landscape of the urban core” (266). The outer boundaries of this industrial space remain ambiguous, which raises broader questions about scale. Is this a methodological intervention that applies to other contexts, including ones where supply chains traverse oceans and national borders? Is the relationship between city and periphery necessarily reciprocal, in the way that Buckley proposes, or was there something particular about this historical conjuncture, this spatial formation, or this industry?
Buckley’s history is well-researched and draws on the work of a range of scholars, from business and labor historians to architectural scholars and cultural geographers. His debts to these scholars are often explicit in the text, which, for specialists, is deeply illuminating. For non-specialists, and especially for undergraduate students, the historiographical asides may make for difficult reading. Nevertheless, this is a book that provokes historians to embrace spatial theory and to think through dimensions of capitalist development that they rarely appreciate.
