infrastructure | patterns of capital by kenneth hayes
mining infrastructure technology the canadian shield opportunities
Sudbury’s harsh beginnings are indelibly stamped into the city, its communities and the landscape. Many profound changes have occurred in Sudbury’s culture in the last two or three decades and its economy has been transformed, but the effects of its past remain. Many industrial towns gentrify by simply transforming the local mill into a tourist site or, increasingly, loft condominiums, but Sudbury cannot change its face so easily. For better or worse, cultural amnesia is not an option here. Mining linked Sudbury’s fate to resource extraction, and thus to capitalism in its most direct form. In his role as an industrial safety inspector for the Habsburg Empire, Franz Kafka identified mining and metallurgy as the ‘primary large-scale enterprises of the pre-mechanical era’. Sinking shafts into the earth to access bodies of ore requires so much capital that mining led the emergence of capitalism from the guilds and restricted economies of the Middle Ages; many an early Renaissance fortune was built on the joint foundations of mining and banking, and resource extraction was often the motive for exploration of the New World. Sudbury’s development displays some of these features in their later, more advanced forms. The I in Inco’s name proclaimed the venture international, but the dominant company in the exploitation of Sudbury’s ore reserves was essentially American. Inco may nominally have been based in Toronto, but Canada’s role in this relationship was at best that of junior partner in a kind of corporate suzerainty. Falconbridge, the newer and smaller corporation in Sudbury, generally enjoyed a better reputation than Inco, but it was not that different. In fact, the rivalry between Inco and Falconbridge over the course of the twentieth century often had the unreal air of a duopoly – the minimum diversity required to maintain the appearance of open competition while colluding for the same ends. In the last decade, Inco and Falconbridge were purchased, respectively, by the giant mining corporations Vale, from Brazil, and Xstrata, from Switzerland. This situation is still regarded (not without some degree of xenophobia) as abnormal, but the truth is that Sudbury has never really ruled itself. Understandably, diversification has been Sudbury’s cultural and economic mandate in recent decades. Fuelled by Northern Ontario’s long-standing regionalist grievances, the city went through a phase of public investment that resulted in the Taxation Data Centre, Science North and improved health-care and educational facilities, but there are now signs that vigorous private initiative is developing outside the thrall of the mines, and doing so in Sudbury’s own inimitable way. The usual process of industrial formation starts with small workshops and, by a process of consolidation, arrives at big industrial enterprises. sudbury incontrovertible
In Sudbury, manufacturing has followed a different course. Its impetus – the movement by the major mining corporations to outsource services, which provided the initial contracts with which to establish small businesses – came late. But in order for these mining-service companies to grow and to survive the effects of periodic strikes, they needed to cultivate new markets and therefore sought either to diversify or to specialise. More than four hundred new businesses have thus developed in Sudbury in the last few decades. These new ventures have had a stabilising effect on the local economy and have greatly increased local industrial-design and engineering capacities. There has, however, been a lag in conceptually assimilating this new phenomenon. The established image of the city is still one of rugged, hardrock mining and labour conflict, while the new reality is one of progressive investment in high-tech manufacturing and services, designed to circulate globally along the distinct trade lines established by mining. Mining’s unique spatial network is tied to places usually far removed from the centres of global finance. In Sudbury, one meets specialised workers, from diamond drillers to geo-tech surveyors, who have worked in such diverse places as Kazakhstan, Chile, Norway, Indonesia, Sardinia, Utah, Micronesia and the Dominican Republic. This, obviously, is not the list of finance, software and biotech cities canonised by urban theorists such as Saskia Sassen and Richard Florida. But minerals have their own map, and mining fosters what could be called geo-cosmopolitanism, a network governed by the wealth underground and only secondarily concerned with problems of access and distribution. Sudbury’s distinct form of globalisation uses distribution channels established in the era when production dominated distribution as an economic concern. Although an improvement over the haywire approach, the geo-cosmopolitan sensibility does not necessarily possess the positive cultural attributes of other forms of cosmopolitanism, and it certainly does not correspond to urban sophistication. Instead, it is predicated on an intense local identity, often at odds with political reality. Nevertheless, it would be unthinkable for a city of Sudbury’s scale and level of development to exist at most mining sites. Traditionally, mining companies were forced to be self-reliant to a remarkable degree, but because Sudbury was initially founded as a logging town at the junction of two railway lines, it was from the start more accessible than most mining towns. This is the key to the city’s continued growth and current relative prosperity. Its permanence testifies to the extraordinary size of the mineral reserves here, but it is transportation that sustains the place. Sudbury is the rare case of a mining camp outliving the resources on which it was founded to become a city with its own internal dynamic. This essay continues from On Site 26: DIRT , in which it was explained that the Sudbury Basin, so rich in nickel and other exotic minerals, was formed 1.6 billion years ago when a massive asteroid hit the earth, splashing molten lava from the earth’s core throughout the region of the Great Lakes, northern Ontario and the northern States.
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