Search Results

This chapter explores how today's neighborhoods operate as flexible spaces of accumulation that range between the extremes of gentrification and ghettoization. It first examines how the new postindustrial regime weakened and dissolved the industrial era order of space, and how it gave rise to a distinct dialectic of ghettoization (disinvestment) and gentrification (investment) in central cities surrounded by a sprawling middle class expanding into the surrounding suburban space. The chapter then considers how the production of space under the new societal regime of flexible accumulation has redefined neighborhoods and social reproduction. It also looks at public–private partnerships that work around the new priorities of accumulation, focusing on the tax increment financing (TIF) district in Chicago. Finally, it discusses the ebbs and flows of neighborhood life today by referring to the experiences of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Englewood.

This chapter examines how community development can be caught in the trappings of flexible accumulation and even contribute to the displacement of the people it claims to represent. Focusing on the process of social engineering vis-à-vis mixed-income housing that the Chicago Housing Authority has been advancing through its Plan for Transformation, the chapter shows how creative destruction and the production of space for accumulation complicates our interpretation of community development practice. It first considers five community development approaches in Chicago before discussing how race and income help create the ghetto as a particular form of homogenous space that requires intervention. It also discusses the ways in which the representation of mixed-income communities is being used to advance gentrification, to classify the poor as either deserving or undeserving, and to further push them into super-ghettoes or destabilized neighborhoods occupied by poor nonwhites.

This book has highlighted the shortcomings of both mainstream and critical approaches used to explain how and why neighborhoods change by focusing on the case of Chicago. The evidence it has presented shows that neighborhoods are important yet limited spaces for study, policy making, and activism. This concluding chapter discusses the three broad categories of forces that shape neighborhood space and change over time in the current regime, both conceptually and practically: flexible accumulation, accumulation by expropriation, and the production of new space whose identity is driven by socialized consumership. It also offers a grounded set of recommendations for a different approach to how we study, document, and experience the realities of neighborhood change, arguing, for example, that we must view every neighborhood as constituted and specifically as a product for consumption or confinement; look for evidence of efforts to produce differential spaces in order to understand how and why some neighborhoods change and others do not; and historicize neighborhoods and explanations for why they change.

This chapter examines the effects of classifying neighborhoods based on ecological indicators, both in the form of representations of space and in the policies/interventions derived from their use. It starts with the assumption that existing theories of neighborhood change have given rise to a particular discursive space in which to interpret urban dynamics. After tracing the origin and evolution of the stable homogeneous neighborhood rooted in human ecology theory, the chapter considers two recent efforts to classify Chicago neighborhoods that demonstrate how we can investigate differently and better understand neighborhoods as sites of consumption and flexible accumulation as well as social reproduction. It shows that today's neighborhoods are spaces of social control in which institutions in a particular combination play a supervisory role and everybody inhabiting the space is expected to reproduce specific positions. The chapter concludes by proposing an alternative view for interpreting neighborhood change.

This chapter examines how the transformation of public housing leads to neighborhood change by focusing on two Chicago neighborhoods: Cabrini Green on the Lower North Side and Lakefront Properties on the South Side. More specifically, it considers how each neighborhood was transformed over decades into a space of flexible accumulation in which to build new mixed-income communities. It first reviews the U.S. housing policy that made transformation necessary and goes on to show how policy implementation controlled to some extent the market forces that normally shape the cycles of creative destruction over time, while also making accumulation and commodification more surgical and calculating in the two neighborhoods. It also demonstrates how social science research in combination with public policy and market mechanisms can result in the gentrification of the public housing ghetto. It argues that public housing residents—the presumed beneficiaries—can be contained and diminished in both the physical and social space of Chicago.