3. Kansas City and Scandinavia

3.1 Kansas City

Site of the first railroad bridge over the Missouri River, the city was ideally placed to centralize the harvesting and storage of grain from the central United States. It lies on a plateau incised by the Missouri and its tributary the Kansas. The steep slopes reveal a 6 m-thick horizontal layer of limestone, an excellent material for rubble, aggregates and ballast that has been quarried intensively since the city's origins, between two more clayey layers that protect the quarries from water infiltration. As early as 1928, the idea of putting the material to dual use appeared: first, to mine it and then to place the city's arterial roads and parking lots in the voids created. But the economic depression prevented this from happening. In 1944, a promoter leased a few...