PROPOSAL TO THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

VIOLENCE, GANGS, AND THE REDIVISION OF SPACE IN CHICAGO

JOHN M. HAGEDORN

This study aims to provide quantitative and qualitative support for the hypothesis that legitimate public policies and neighborhood processes of social control can lead to segregation and thus reinforce violence.  While not comparative in design, it looks at city-specific factors in Chicago to better understand the stubborn pattern of high rates of violence.   Through field work and interviews, the study will describe how legitimate processes like gentrification, the displacement of gangs, the tearing down of housing
projects, and the release of former inmates, may lead to violence.

The research will proceed in two stages.  First the PI will supervise the compiling of quantitative data on economic and demographic trends and variations in violence in Chicago's neighborhoods and display that data graphically.   Other data to be compiled include maps of gang turf from 1926 to the present, showing the movement of gang areas over time, and how gangs today have moved in response to spatial re-division.   The study will also compile:  Department of Corrections data on the addresses of parolees and probationers;  infant mortality and other data stored in Chicago's Community fact book (now administered at UIC);  data on the movement of displaced Chicago Housing
Authority residents; and crime rates, particularly homicide, which has address-based data (Blockand Block 1991).

Gentrifying areas will be compared to socially isolated areas in trends of violence using standard t tests and regressions.  Both raw change scores and residual change score approaches will be considered to look at change over time (Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush 2001).   However, the principal objective of this phase will be to display data geographically in a series of maps (Al-Kodmany 2001). ArcInfo or other GIS software will be used to construct a geographical database of the relevant data. Great Cities Scholars Kheir Al-Kodmany and James Sosnoski will help the PI construct virtual models of segregation, gentrification, and the geographical distribution of violence and publish them on the web.

 

For example, changes over the entire 20^th century of Chicago's segregated areas can be virtuallydisplayed and animated, so that a century of change could be seen unfolding in a few seconds.  Agraphic, web-based display of data can make the findings of the study more understandable to both the public and policymakers.

 

While the quantitative analysis and geo-coding is proceeding, fieldwork and interviews will target key informants from gang members to police officers to describe, from different points of view, the impact of legitimate social processes:  

(1)           In gentrifying areas, like sections of Humboldt Park, Pilsen, Englewood and Lawndale,
the fieldwork will document incidents of hostility by area residents toward the newcomers. In Humboldt Park, area residents are currently videotaping discriminatory treatment by
authorities of area youth.  The study will look at community policing, block watch, and othersocial control measures within areas, which have high levels of "collective efficacy." 
Interviews with key informants from the gangs to police will seek to understand how
neighborhood social processes act to exclude or include minority youth.

(2)           Using the PI's contacts and resources from the Chicago Gang History Project, the
study will document case studies of what happens to gangs as they are relocated through
gentrification and destruction of housing projects.

 

(3)           In Roseland and other areas on the south and west sides, the PI will interview
residents in both licit and illicit networks and observe the impact of the relocation of
housing project tenants in those neighborhoods.

(4)           In Roseland, Englewood, and Lawndale, interviews and fieldwork will describe the
impact of concentrations of ex-offenders on legal and illegal networks within these
neighborhoods.

The interviews will be with key informants, selected in order to highlight specific processes, not on the basis of random selection.  The PI has a wide assortment of contacts within each of the proposed study neighborhoods.  This kind of "purposive sample"is akin to Strauss' "theoretical sampling" (1987, 38) where the researcher decides on analytic grounds what data to collect and in what order.  The intent is "verstehen"in Weber's sense, to understand social processes as different participants see them.  However the study will do more than merely report conflicting perspectives (see Fontana 1994).  The PI has had a long history of collaborative analysis of data (Hagedorn 1996), and the findings and conclusions of the study will be discussed with community residents, as well as scholars at the Great Cities Institute. In this way, the research will strive to represent how participants interpret social processes and how their various interpretations can lead to real violence.

Study neighborhoods. Yellow areas are 90% or moreAfrican American. Blue Areas are 90% or more Latino. While areas are 90% or more white. Red areas are 50-70% Asian

All interviews will be transcribed, coded, and analyzed using qualitative techniques used for years by the Principal Investigator (Strauss 1987; Hagedorn 1996). Interviews will  be supplemented by fieldwork, as the PI becomes engaged in the observation of social processes in the study neighborhoods.  The study will include documents on the history of gangs in Chicago, a study currently under way by the PI, a fellow at the Great Cities Institute.  This project will also be enriched by a spring 2002 conference, "Gangs and the Global City," organized by the PI, bringing to UIC16[ii] leading scholars who aim to integrate urban political economy with criminology.  Finally, the PI is also a participant in the four city
(Chicago, Belfast, Berlin, and Jerusalem) "contested city" project that will interface with this proposed study.

 

To conclude, the new economy characteristically valorizes some spaces and marginalizes others. A central motif of urban political economy is that space equals power (Harvey 1990), a concept well understood by politicians and developers everywhere.  This proposal, however, hypothesizes that globalization createsdifferent kinds of spatial processes in different kinds of cities.  Legitimate policies, like crime prevention, may inadvertently lead to segregation and thus undermine citywide efforts to reduce crime.  This complicates Hannah Arendt's (1969) classic contrast of violence and power,  since it is the exercise of
legitimate power  that may lead to violence.  

Chicago's current spatial re-division, it must be stressed, is not a "natural" occurrence, independent of actions by officials and residents.  Policies to reduce crime are important for all inhabitants of neighborhoods, but how they are carried out matters.  The re-concentration of Chicago's African American ghetto eerily echoes ethnic and religious conflicts in Belfast and Jerusalem and may set Chicago apart from global cities like New York or Tokyo, as Janet Abu-Lughod suggested.  By joining criminology with urban political economy, we might shed new light on the trends of urban violence
in the information era, and what we can do about them.

 

Existing planning concepts specifying gentrifying areas (e.g. changes in median income, housing value, demographics,  percent public welfare, percent female-headed households, new business starts ) will be among the designated variables.