This essay unravels the history of Chicago as an urban laboratory and the way crisis was utilised and even staged in order to project alternative scenarios. It centres on a single photograph of an intersection from 1909, which shows the location saturated with a shocking amount of traffic brought to a standstill. To make visible what commonly remained hidden (the flows and intensities of urban movement), city officials had administered an urban experiment that suspended police presence and regulation in an effort to test if the metropolis could still self-regulate. Using the city as a stage for experimentation that at times pushed it to the brink of collapse, Chicago’s officials perceived their town as an urban test-bed. Injecting this reading into our established historiography reconfigures some of its most prominent narratives: from Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats, and Burnham and Bennett’s Plan for the city, to the Chicago school of sociology.

中文翻译：

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十字路口的故事，或芝加哥如何早期成为城市实验室

这篇文章揭示了芝加哥作为城市实验室的历史，以及危机被利用甚至上演以预测替代情景的方式。它以一张 1909 年的十字路口照片为中心，该照片显示该地点充满了令人震惊的交通量，导致停顿。为了让人们看到通常隐藏的东西（城市运动的流动和强度），城市官员进行了一项城市实验，暂停警察的存在和监管，以测试大都市是否仍然可以自我调节。芝加哥的官员利用这座城市作为试验舞台，有时将其推向崩溃的边缘，芝加哥的官员将他们的城镇视为城市试验台。将这种阅读注入我们既定的史学，重新配置了一些最突出的叙述：