PROPOSAL TO THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

VIOLENCE, GANGS, AND THE REDIVISION OF SPACE IN CHICAGO

JOHN M. HAGEDORN

Printable Version

RESEARCH PLAN

I. Introduction                                       

This proposal begins with a simple question:  "Why hasn't Chicago seen sharp
declines in violence like New York, Boston, or Los Angeles?"   While "dual cities"
(Castells and Mollenkopf 1992) appearto be general features of the global economy,
what city-specific factors explain and influence variationsin violence?  Do cities like
Chicago, with long histories of racist or religious violence, follow a different trajectory
than global cities like New York or Tokyo?   Might gentrification and the manner in
which Chicago has carried out public policies, like the tearing down of housing projects,
reinforce segregationand thus indirectly promote violence?

Some social scientists (e.g. Sampson, Raudebush, and Earls 1996) search for universal
correlates ofviolence by using  concepts like "collective efficacy" of densely tied
neighborhood networks. Others (e.g. Blumstein and Wallman 1999) have analyzed
complex factors behind the nineties "crime drop" in the US.  Most criminological
perspectives, however, have difficulty explaining variation between cities.  This
proposal suggests that criminology needs to engage concepts from urban political
economy in order to understand differing urban trends in violence.

Chicago, like New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, has mutually reinforcing
patterns of development and poverty (Sassen 1991). It is in areas of "social isolation"
(Wilson 1987) or "social exclusion"(Castells 1997) where rates of violence are highest. 
While all cities have poor, minority, high crime areas, patterns and trends of violence
differ sharply between citie

Uniform Crime Reports show that old manufacturing centers like Detroit or St. Louis,
which have not transitioned well into the information economy, also have extremely
high rates of violence (>30/100,000). On the other hand, information cities like New
York or Boston (< 10/100,000) have seen sharp decreases. But some cases are not so
easy to explain. Chicago, for example, is an old manufacturing center that now has a
booming information economy. Yet, social indicators like homicide (>20/100,000)
and infant mortality have not declined in the same manner as in other global
cities.  What other factors may be at work? 

We might profit by considering the comparative per­spective of Janet Abu-Lughod
(1999). While she found Los Angeles and New York had bright prospects in the new economy, Chicago's future, she thought, hinged on "whether the irreversible trend toward
marginalization of poorer African Americans within the city [could] be reversed (357)."
In fact, criminologists have long associated high homicide rates with inequality and
segregation (Bailey  1984; Taylor and Covington 1988; Lane 1997; Shihadah and
Maume  1997). Following Abu-Lughod's logic, it may be that some U.S. cities
have more intractable problems with race than others.

Internationally, Chicago's difficulties may parallel those in "contested" cities
(Perry 2001), like Jerusalem and Belfast, where violence has been organically
related to ethnic and religious segregation.  The "invisible walls" (Clark 1964)
of the ghetto, for example, could be seen as Chicago's counterpart to the
barriers between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast and between Jews
and Palestinians in Jerusalem.

 

Today's tearing down of housing projects, along with a massive expansion of what Zukin (1991) calls the"Super-Loop," has not diffused the Black ghetto, but re-concentrated it further west and further south(see charts in Abu-Lughod 1999, 336-7). Many interstitial areas, long the home to Chicago's gangs, have been invaded by professionals scouting for convenient housing near the Loop, pushing poor residents out and demanding reductions in crime.

 

 

This proposal seeks to investigate how the current re-division of space in Chicago is related to violence.  It hypothesizes that some public policies and legitimate social processes contribute toward segregation, and in this way reinforce Chicago's relatively high rates of violence.

 

The yellow areas represent census tracts which are 90% or more black in the 2000 census.

 
Go to literature review: A Criminology and the History of Urban Violence