PROPOSAL TO THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION
VIOLENCE, GANGS, AND THE REDIVISION OF SPACE IN CHICAGO
JOHN M. HAGEDORN
B. Globalization, Crime, and Urban Political Economy
have considered the impact of globalization on the city. Sassen (1991), who developed the concept
of the
"global city," focuses on the impact of the agglomeration of
business and residences in the central
business zones on social organization within the city.
| Sassen argues that
the information era, rather than allowing work to decentralize, in
fact centralizes work within downtowns of key global cities in order
to maximize the creative potential of face-to-faceinteraction. Gentrification,
then, is the "natural" tendency of people to move close
to work and be with people "like themselves."
Cities like New York and Chicago, which offer unmatched amenities,
attract the new professional class to areas surrounding downtown.
The professionals moving into previously poor neighborhoods build
protective "walls" (Judd 1999; Caldiera 2000) around their
residences, mainly as a matter of security. These "walls"can be gated communities,
pacification strategies like "community
policing," or other technologies of public and private surveillance. |
The red spots are Starbucks coffee houses. The green dots are currency exchanges. |
The new economy valorizes some spaces,
but marginalizes others. Castells (1996,7,8) points out that the
information era reinforces the existence of "socially excluded" areas, which are "unwired"
and left out
by development. These areas are marked by racial segregation, high rates of
violence, and an underground economy that is crucial for survival (see
Castells, Portes, and Benton 1989; Hagedorn and Goldstein 1999). The persistence and maintenance of Chicago's
"dark ghetto" (Clark 1964) is one concrete manifestationof social
exclusion.
Three Redivisions of Space in Chicago
1. The formation and consolidation of the
ghetto in the first half of the 20th century;
2. The making of
a "second ghetto"(Hirsch 1983) in the 1950s and 1960s by building
physical structures,
such as high rise projects, highways, and universities as concrete barriers
between the Loop and Black
neighborhoods; and 3. The creation of a"Super-Loop" in the last
decade, through reclaiming space previously occupied by African Americans
and Latinos, and the reconstruction of the Black ghetto further south
and west. All three redivisions
were accompanied by a rhetoric of fear of crime and disorder.
largely the children of immigrants, rebelling against their parents' old
world culture and not constrained
by effective social institutions (Kornhauser 1978). But the Chicago School treated the Black
experience
simply as an ethnic variant, a notion challenged by Drake and Cayton (1970),
Spear (1983) and others
(Hall 1988).
The
race riot of 1919 was related to the competition between whites and
blacks over jobs, but
was basically a pogrom, lashing out at the influx of black migrants into
ethnic spaces. This resulted
in the forcible confinement of African Americans into a physical ghetto,
sanctioned by official policy
(Philpott 1978). One rationale for segregation was the prevention of crime
and disorder in white
ethnic neighborhoods, by keeping out the "invading" African
Americans (Rakove 1975).
at containing the expanding Black population, still flowing into Chicago
at the end of the industrial era.
Whites fled the central zones to the outlying areas and suburbs, fighting
a losing guerrilla war, using
both legal means (variants of restrictive
covenants) and illegal means (naked violence) to contain the
Black Belt. In the 1950s and 1960s, policies of resistance to integration
by the Chicago Democratic
machine neatly dovetailed with its plans to redevelop the Loop.
As Mayor Richard J. Daley realized that Chicago's future was tied to the
Loop, not industry, urban
redevelopment demolished low-income minority housing to expand the Loop
and create more middle class neighborhoods.
The redevelopment also doubled as walls between a growing African American
population and the Loop and white ethnic neighborhoods.
The University of Illinois-Chicago
was
located to protect the Loop's western flank from eastern expansion of
the west side ghetto, just
as the
Robert Taylor Homes and Dan Ryan Expressway attempted to stem western
expansion of the south side
Black Belt. In Chicago,
the lack of affordable housing and segregation became the central issues
for the
civil rights movement. But Daley's political machine was based
on a coalition of Loop interests and
ethnic neighborhoods. His solution was to further concentrate
the Black population, not to promote
integration (Cohen and Taylor 2000).
stage for a new round of violence in the 1960s "urban crisis era."
Gang violence and other forms of
crime sharply increased in desperate and frustrated African American and
Latino neighborhoods.
African Americans particularly found themselves ghettoized and
trapped in walled-off spaces.
Gangs
began to affiliate across segregated neighborhoods in the 1960s, and form
"nations" which were more
than temporary alliances of neighborhood cliques.
The permanent state of the ghetto spawned
permanent gangs. The temporary politicization of gangs in Chicago came to a violent end
with
massive police repression (e.g. Dawley 1992; Fry 1973; Spergel et al.
1969). Daley's
"war on gangs"
(Chicago Police Dept. 1969) moved them en masse from
the streets into the prisons, with disastrous
future consequences. Once more, crime became the rallying cry for policies
that reinforced the walls of segregation.
thousands of Black people in high-rise projects that were allowed to deteriorate,
was crimogenic
(Venkatesh 2000), and reinforced the violence of the ghetto.
As the industrial economy crumbled,
joblessness and crime in poor minority neighborhoods shot up.
(Simpson 2001; Clavel and Wiewel 1991).
Chicago's first Black mayor's focus on violence reduction
and conflict mediation from within the community produced modest results
(Citizen's Committee 1986). But
Black political power did not last long (1983-1987) and the city's "war
on crime" resumed full-tilt.
Like other cities, violence flared up in Chicago during the crack
wars. But unlike New York, L.A., or Boston,
a sharp reversal never materialized, as homicide stayed at levels more
than twice as high as
New York City's. To understand
this phenomenon, we need to understand Chicago's third major
re-division of space.
3. Like
other global cities, Chicago has experienced a sustained economic boom
over the course of the
past decade which has sponsored another great redivision of space. This third redivison of space
consists of several policies and spatial processes which, the proposal
hypothesizes, may contribute to
Chicago's stubborn resistance to lower rates of violence.
| The expansion of the Loop entails tearing down near-by
high-rise projects and clearing space in adjacent neighborhoods. Chicago's massive high rises, like Cabrini-Green on the north side, and Robert Taylor Homes just south of the Loop, have long been the scene of Chicago's highest crime rates. While the rhetoric of crime prevention was used to justify the destruction of the projects, developers openly coveted the land. |
A hole now stands where a Cabrini-Green High Rise building once stood.
|
It appears that the re-formation of Chicago's
Black ghetto further west and south has displaced violence,
not significantly decreased it. As Morenoff and Sampson (1997) have shown,
it is in those peripheral
areas where violence has been the highest. For example, Roseland,
a neighborhood where African
American steelworkers lived when they were excluded from South Chicago
in the 1920s, has been
devastated by de-industrialization. It now is one of the prime areas for migration
of former CHA
tenants and has high rates of violence. Lawndale,
on the west side, the historic home of the Vice
Lords
, where demographic pressure from gentrification has pushed the ghetto
against the city limits, also is
among the neighborhoods where homicide clusters.
| ii. As the areas around the Loop gentrify, youthful
residents exhibit hostility toward the arriving middle class and sometimes commit vandalism and assorted acts of class- and race-related violence. This typically leads to stepped-up security measures and harassment of minority youth. Consistent reports through the years have been told of slumlords hiring gangs to terrorize residents and burn down buildings to make room for condominiums, a "complicity" in self-destruction which is a defining example of Bourdieu's (1993) "symbolic violence." |
Why are they tearing down Cabrini-Green? As the projects come down
the condos go up...and Starbucks moves in. |
iii. One overlooked consequence of both gentrification
and the destruction of the projects has been the
displacement of gangs. Some gangs disappear when their turf is
destroyed or invaded. But
most gangs
relocate into another neighborhood. This means that the relocated gang
must make an accomodation
with a new gang and area drug dealers, and often a violent contest ensues.
iv. This "geography of exclusion" (Sibley
1995) is paralleled by increases in prison
population. Since the
early 1970s, gangs have dominated the inmate social organization and kept
strong ties to the streets
(Jacobs 1977). Every major gang in Chicago is now run by leadership within
the prison. As Wacquant
(2000) argues, the prison and the ghetto now are linked on a single carcereal
continuum. Released
inmates likely concentrate in high crime areas of Chicago's ghetto
(see Clear 1996 for New
York City), though no local research on this topic exists.
Wacquant (2000) argues that the dynamics of the new economy is creating
a different kind of ghetto.
This new ghetto is more of a warehouse/prison than a regulator
of labor, as in the past. Janet
Abu-Lughod (2000), while supporting Wacquant's central thesis, suggests that the Black experience
may differ by city, and that the ghetto in Chicago may have markedly different
characteristics than
in New York or Los Angeles. Rather
than generalize from Chicago, as Wacquant appears to do,
Abu-Lughod suggests we undertake a city-specific study of the urban ghetto
and the
policies which maintain it.