CHANGING REALITIES: THE NEW RACIALIZED REDEVELOPMENT RHETORIC IN CHICAGO (original) (raw)
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Urban Affairs Review, 49 (3), 435-467
""Urban redevelopment governances are commonly treated as singular, monolithic entities that are interactively homogeneous, deploying uniform ensembles of policies and practices across their respective cities. This study, alternatively, reveals these formations as adroitly proactive and interactively heterogeneous across their respective cities. Through a racial economy lens, we empirically examine the racial contours of this “governance heterogeneity” in one urban setting: Chicago, Illinois. In this frame, a comparative analysis of Chicago’s Bronzeville and Pilsen neighborhoods is presented. Both neighborhoods are constituted by different racial profiles: Bronzeville is home to a predominantly African-American population, whereas Pilsen is mostly Mexican and Mexican-American. The study reveals that redevelopment governances are differentially responsive to established, deeply rooted racialized conceptions of “Blackness” and “Latinoness.” As a result, the form and trajectory of redevelopment in both settings has unfolded in markedly different ways.""
The Revanchist City: Downtown Chicago and the Rhetoric of Redevelopment in Bronzeville
2022
This paper examines and interprets the contrived cycle of disinvestment and reinvestment in Bronzeville—the original settlement area of Blacks in Chicago. The historical political, economic, and social policy of confinement and segregation in Chicago created a high concentration of public housing in Bronzeville. Data reveals that the disinvestment process in Bronzeville correlates with the concentration of public housing. As the cost of local, state, and federal practices to maintain and concentrate public housing in Bronzeville increased, a new public policy of housing demolition to create mixed income housing development, coupled with decline of Chicago’s manufacturing base and subsequent rise in information and consumption-based economy, sparked reinvestment. Our data reveal that the process of disinvestment and reinvestment—gentrification—doesn’t just happen by chance but in fact is socially contrived and planned. Under the rhetoric and language of being concerned for the well-b...
Gentrification by design : rhetoric, race, and style in neighborhood "revitalization”
2016
It was 2013 and the change to the neighborhood was slow and steady over the previous two years. First, there was the construction of a fancy new apartment complex a few blocks away. The building's empty storefronts took a while to fill, but soon a sports bar, Radio Shack, electric bike company and standup paddling shop attracted shoppers and residents alike. Although food trailers always characterized that part of town, the "trailer park" at the edge of the new mixed-use development diverged from typical East Riverside taco truck fare and featured trailers offering everything from sandwiches, to desserts, to Krispy Kreme. Other parts of the neighborhood were changing too. Two Red River music venues relocated to the area as increasing rents and sound regulations forced Emo's and Beauty Ballroom to move east of their downtown digs. A little further up the road at Riverside and I-35, multi-million dollar condos were being built. At the time, I lived within walking distance of these new amenities in an apartment complex surrounded by acres of vacant lots and construction sites. Where low-income housing units one stood, a construction zone emerged. Construction crews worked six days a week and with each passing month, the transformation of the physical and cultural characteristics of the neighborhood intensified. Writing in 2013, I began the final paragraph of my dissertation prospectus with the following: "Once the dissertation is complete, my neighborhood will have completely transformed. The description in this prospectus will render East Riverside Corridor unrecognizable to those who encounter it months from now." After those sentences were written, the change along East Riverside was rapid. This kind of change, frequently referred to as revitalization or redevelopment is often welcomed, celebrated, and promoted as proponents cite environmental, social, and economic benefits to the city, 1 Gentrification in cities like New York (for example see Zukin or Freeman), San Francisco (for example see Solnit and Schwartzenberg), Chicago (for example see Bennett and Schaefer or Fleming) has been studied somewhat extensively, though the shape it takes varies by neighborhood, time, and place. 2 Just to name a few, cities like London (for example see Glass or Butler and Robson), Melbourne (Jager), Sydney (Shaw), and Montreal (Rose) have all experienced gentrification.
How New is New Urban Renewal? Class, Redevelopment and Black Politics
nonsite. org, 2019
This article contends that a closer examination of the early period of urban renewal would have given us clues about the political behavior of black professional-managerial stratum in the more recent period of urban redevelopment. I draw upon examples from Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, and Oakland in the early 1960s to show the continuity between the two periods of urban redevelopment by first highlighting black property owners and real estate professionals pursuing their class interests in the postwar period, and second, underline the class content of racial uplift ideology particularly evident in the more recent instances of black gentrification in Chicago. I examine both postwar and contemporary redevelopment to illustrate the continuity of black professional-managerial class interests between the two periods and the consequences for the study of black politics.
Conceptualizing the New Urban Renewal Comparing the Past to the Present
Urban Affairs Review, 2012
In the 1990s and 2000s, inner city neighborhood redevelopment occurred throughout the United States as billions in public and private investments entered impoverished black communities. This revitalization process led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans. Based on this circumstance, some scholars suggest that this circumstance was a return to the past urban renewal period . While there have been many case studies of contemporary inner city redevelopment, this article uses a comparative historical approach to claim that we have entered and completed a new urban renewal period (1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) that rivals but yet is distinct from the old urban renewal period in four important ways. First, the new urban renewal was a central business district (CBD) expansion strategy, whereas the old urban renewal was a preservation strategy. Second, the dynamics driving the new urban renewal were more complex and included global, federal, and local factors, while federal forces were more important in structuring the old urban renewal. Third, the consequences of the new urban renewal were not explained by race alone but involved an interaction between race and class. Lastly, the new urban renewal was associated with rising suburban poverty and the old urban renewal institutionalized the inner city ghetto. Specifying the parallels and differences between the old at Virginia Tech on June 19, 2012 uar.sagepub.com Downloaded from Hyra 499 and new urban renewal periods is vital for understanding how twentiethand twenty-first-century urban policies, and their consequences, relate to an ever-changing metropolitan America.
Planning, Urban Revitalization, and the Inner City: An Exploration of Structural Racism
Journal of Planning Literature, 2000
The almost inextricable weaving together of the issues of race and inner-city revitalization presents a complex and seemingly intractable problem for urban and regional planners, scholars, policymakers, activists, and citizens. This article presents an overview of the dilemma from a city and regional planning perspective. It begins with a brief summary of basic planning theory, followed by a more detailed description of specific theories of revitalization, as well as a discussion of four of the most important forces of structural racism that confront inner cities. The article closes with a discussion of those approaches that have shown some promise and with suggestions for potential new approaches that will promote successful inner-city revitalization and reduce the isolation and deprivation of racial minorities inhabiting America’s cities.
Governing the “New Hometowns”: Race, Power, and Neighborhood Participation in the New Inner City
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2006
Inner city residents, once shunned and ignored by city planners, are now seen as a vital resource in United States urban redevelopment plans. This shift in perspective has come at a time when municipal elites routinely champion the neoliberal strategies of privatization, marketization, and consumerism across the urban policy spectrum. In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia to illuminate the ways in which race, power, and neighborhood participation shape urban governance. Against the governmentalist approach, which tends to present a totalizing vision of neoliberal rule, this article emphasizes the failures and instabilities of urban governance under contemporary conditions. In particular, I direct attention to the overlooked dynamics of racial politics as they play out at the neighborhood level, where attempts to encourage self-governance on the part of inner city residents are predicated upon post-civil rights era notions of diversity and multiculturalism. The imposition of this politics produces new forms of racial inequality and class division that, paradoxically, undermine neoliberal rule itself.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2001
Most scholarly efforts to understand the political economy of postwar urban redevelopment have typically viewed urban renewal and public housing as "housing" programs that originated with the "federal" government. Yet this view is problematic for two reasons. First, it fails to specify the key actors and organized interests, especially real estate officials and downtown business elites, in the programmatic design and implementation of urban renewal and public housing. Second, this view does not fully acknowledge the dislocating and segregative effects of urban renewal and public housing on central city neighborhoods and the role these private-public initiatives played in shaping demographic and population patterns in the postwar era. I draw upon archival data and newspaper articles, real estate industry documents, government reports, and interviews to examine the origin, local implementation, and segregative effects of urban renewal and public housing in Kansas City, Missouri. I explore the role of the ideology of privatism-the underlying commitment by the public sector to enhancing the growth and prosperity of private institutions-in shaping the postwar "system" of urban economic development in which urban renewal and public housing were formulated and implemented. Focusing on the interlocking nature of race and class, I identify the critical links between urban renewal and public housing, and the long-term impact of these programs on metropolitan development in the decades after World War II.
Book Review: Race, Politics, and Community Development in U.S. Cities
Urban Affairs Review, 2006
The final chapter of the book helps urbanists make sense of post-1960s commercial downtowns in the United States, in particular their urban malls, festival marketplaces, and historic preservation. Alison Isenberg is one of several planning historians, including Gail DuBrow, Max Page, and Randall Mason, who finally are writing critical accounts that interpret preservation in the context of planning and urban development. Isenberg reminds us, "There is no authentic downtown past to contrast with a fake urban present, just as there is no lost democratic heyday" (p. 315). Instead, downtown has been a venue through which Americans project, promote, and contest their values and visions for the nation, its economy, and culture writ large. "During the course of the twentieth century, Main Street has been a place to teach, debate, exclude, fantasize, argue, include, make new dreams, and revisit old ones" (p. 316). As the book's epilogue on remaking the World Trade Center site attests, Main Street remains that place today. This book should be read widely by scholars, practitioners, and students of urban policy, planning, preservation, history, and sociology. Downtown America promises to become a classic work of urban and planning history. It is an important critique of race and gender in urban development, a definitive study of the twentieth-century commercial downtown, and a masterful account of people's power to shape metropolitan life.