Commentary: What is special about Chicago?

City and Society

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 289-303

  Abu Lughod, Janet L ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

URBAN AREA;

EID: 30844454055     PISSN: 08930465     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/city.2005.17.2.289     Document Type: Note

References (36)

1. See Albion Small, "Scholarship and Social Agitation," in American Journal of Sociology, Volume 1 (March 1896):581-592.
2. One of the first to call attention to the role played by women scholars and activists in influencing the agendas and methods of their male colleagues in the segregated "academic" department at the same university was Mary Jo Deegan. See her Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988).
3. Michael Dear has been the most explicit animator of this movement. See his edited From Chicago to L.A. (Sage Publications, 2001)
4. and his lead article in City and Community, Vol. I (1) (March 2002):5-28, which sparked lively rejoinders in the same issue, mostly from adherents to and defenders of the Chicago School.
5. Robert Fogelson's superb history of Los Angeles, indeed, is titled The Fragmented Metropolis.
6. Incidentally, Dear erroneously classified me as an honorary member of the L.A. School, whereas I think I am more ecumenical - using each approach where relevant to the place and issue. My own position on the "duel of the schools" is that the characteristics of cities, and even parts of cities, differ and obviously require different concepts and tools to unpack what is happening in them. For example, I think one could use a more "Chicago School" approach to understand South Central L.A., even though the L.A. approach may work better in Orange County. The reason there is no "New York School" is not that urbanists working in that city have been less sophisticated, but that the city contains widely varying zones and subcultures and is subject to distinctive forces (i.e., mass transit, complex terrain and waterways, Manhattan vs Outer Boroughs, as well as rapid turnovers in land uses and occupants) that make it quite different from, and more complex than, either Chicago or Los Angeles. One theory does not fit all, nor should it be expected to do so.
7. One can gain some sense of its diversity from a sample of books written about its historical development. See, for example, Robert E. Faris's Chicago Sociology, 1920-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) which includes a chronological listing of the MA theses produced in that fertile period;
8. and the less satisfying Lester R. Kurtz, Evaluating Chicago Sociology: A Guide to the Literature. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
9. See Milla Alihan, Social Ecology: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938).
10. See Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922). The authorship has traditionally been listed as Chicago Commission on Race Relations.
11. "Can Neighborhood Work Have a Scientific Basis?" reprinted in The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967):142-155.
12. Just as Park had seized upon Barrow's ideas on ecology and adapted them to the subconsensual processes of the city, so Burgess adapted concepts and applied methods from the new field of urban land economics to his analysis of Chicago's spatial order. See, for example, Richard Hurd, Principles of City Land Values (1924);
13. McMichael and Bingham's City Growth and Values (1923);
14. and Morehouse and Ely, Elements of Land Economics (1924),
15. all cited in Louis Wirth's extensive annotated bibliography appended to the 1967 edition of Park and Burgess, The City (161-228, esp. 204).
16. It may be that New York and Chicago more easily lend themselves to this method than does Los Angeles, a city on wheels. My own field methods had to be modified when studying that city in connection with my book, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
17. The new field of "visual sociology" would have pleased Park enormously. Kudos to Louise Cainkar's contribution.
18. See the valiant attempt by John McGreevy in his sensitive book, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), to explain why Catholics have so strongly resisted racial changes in their neighborhoods and have, up to the recent past, tended to stay in center cities instead of moving to the suburbs.
19. I recall a map made thirty years ago, identifying sections of Chicago that contained mixtures of persons of Irish, Polish and Italian descent. My students and I used it to locate predominately Catholic subareas in the city, given the fact that religious information could not be collected by the Census.
20. An interesting link between the Cainkar and Wedam chapters is the latter's report that in the aftermath of 9/11, "SWOP organized a public demonstration against vandals that damaged property at the Chicago Islamic Center on 63rd Street," protecting the center by surrounding it for several Fridays by a peaceful vigil. This supports Cainkar's observation that intergroup relations were better in the southwest corridor than in the suburbs.
21. See, inter alia, the works of Gerald Suttles on this conflictual process: The Social Order of the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968);
22. and his more generalized critique contained in his Man-made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). One of the more bizarre justapositions is the preservation of Jane Addams' low rise Hull House on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, surrounded and dwarfed by the university's tall fortress-like structures.
23. St. Claire Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis, originally published in two volumes by the University of Chicago Press in 1945 and subsequently republished several times, most recently in one volume in 1993.
24. W. I. Thomas had originally recruited Park to the University of Chicago from Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee, and after Park's retirement from Chicago, he joined his former student, Charles S. Johnson, by then president of Fisk.
25. There are ominous precedents. The areas nearest to the Loop in the Second [west side] Ghetto, destroyed in the 1968 Chicago riot, have long been cleared and rebuilt with glistening office buildings and high priced condos.
26. As Boyd notes, in 1990 public housing projects "made up half of the community's housing" whereas owner-occupied dwellings accounted for only 7 percent of the housing stock.
27. Michelle Boyd and I have recently communicated by email. She not only reported that, as of 2005, almost all of the projects in her study area have been demolished, but expressed her sense of betrayal: "I'm getting mad all over again just thinking about it," she wrote. I am grateful to her for alerting me to a special issue of the Chicago Reporter (August 2005) that I was able to access on the internet and on which some of the following account depends. It is a pity that she had no time to expand her article.
28. I omit the even more scandalous story of Urban Renewal/Redevelopment.
29. This sordid tale is told in Martin Meyerson and Edward Banfield's Politics, Planning and the Public Interest (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955). The sole exception was spite approval of a site in the ward of a disliked white liberal councilman!
30. In contrast and during the same period, New York's public housing sites, scattered throughout the five boroughs, were submitted by housing czar Robert Moses for Board of Aldermanic approval as unified bundles that could not be vetoed individually. New York City's massive projects were also in the preferred high-rise pattern and, although not paragons of maintenance, still serve about 1.5 million inhabitants.
31. See Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research (Summer 2000, Vol. 21, No. 1 citing the work of Susan Popkin et al. (all former associates of the Institute), The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago (Rutgers University Press, 2000).
32. An excellent account can be found in Sudhir Venkatesh and Isil Celimli [the former a card carrying member of the new and more sophisticated "Chicago School"], "Tearing Down the Community," Shelterforce Online (Issue No. 138, November/December 2004).
33. Ida B. Wells was originally built under the PHA in 1937 as an attractive low-rise development around courtyards. It was still in good shape when I did my first fieldwork research there in 1948! Only later was it "expanded", and only later was it essentially "abandoned" by neglect.
34. www.chicagoreporter.com.
35. Venkatesh and Cemili (2004).
36. Venkatesh and Cemili (2004).