Defining Engagement
In addition to understanding the history and setting of Chicago, it is also necessary to distinguish key terms and provide context on how these terms manifest themselves within the city. When I assert that ownership and trust influence participation in shaping the city, I am referring to three different spheres of participation—city-mediated action, DIY action, and community-engaged planning. For the sake of this study, the following definitions for these spheres will be employed:
City-mediated action: when the government allows for residents to take action and assert some ownership over the community (ex: buying vacant lots for $1 or large discounts, giving space for public art or performance, etc.).
DIY action: when residents pursue action to improve their communities without permission of the government, sometimes in ways that are illegal (ex: gardening in a lot without buying it, public art without permission, etc.)
Community-engaged planning: when the government or urban planning firms solicit community insight. The community is not involved in the actual process of changing the community, only influencing it through their opinions.
I elaborate on the manifestations of each of these within the city of Chicago in the sections below.
CITY-MEDIATED ACTION
Vacant Lots – Chicago’s Large Lots Program
The most prevalent form of city-mediated action cities have been using is programs that allow residents to purchase city-owned vacant land for a reduced price if they are able to create a plan for the space (these lots are often turned into housing or community gardens) and take care of it, giving ownership back to individual members of these neighborhoods. In Chicago this manifested itself as the Large Lots program, a city initiative aimed at helping “property owners, block clubs, and non-profit groups in select Chicago neighborhoods…purchase City-owned land for $1 per parcel” (City of Chicago n.d.). It was a part of a larger goal to improve neighborhoods and housing (over 41,000 units across the city), running on a pilot basis from 2014-2018 (ibid).
While the impact of these programs can vary from city to city, studies have found that in Chicago, this type of action yields positive results such as lowering crime rates, poverty rates, unemployment rates, and increasing the median property value (Chen and Conroy 2023). These associations, however, are also associated with a reduction in neighborhood greenness, suggesting that they are present in areas where vacant lots are not being converted into community gardens or parks. This is confirmed by Park and Ciorici (2013), who found that vacant lots had a higher chance of being converted into community gardens in higher-income neighborhoods where a higher proportion of residents had completed an undergraduate education. This means that the demands for urban greening in the context of the Large Lots program are concentrated in neighborhoods where there is evidence of gentrification already taking place (Rigolon et al 2020). More research is needed to establish whether this is something that residents are aware of and whether or not it plays a role in their decision to participate as well as their decision on what they will build.
Wide-spread interest in the program and success with sales led a similar program to be relaunched in November 2022, this time on a portal called ChiBlockBuilder. Applications from residents were accepted until February 2023. Residents could apply on the site for lots with plans to create housing, a side yard, commercial development, or open space for community such as gardens or parks. The first-round data shows that there were over 1,600 applications received with 664 of those being for affordable housing and 231 being for open spaces (City of Chicago 2023). This is significant because it suggests less interest in collective ownership and improvement, and more interest in individual ownership and improvement, which could reveal interesting connections between community-engagement, trust, and ownership.
Regardless of the kind of application approved, neighborhood beautification has been reported as a positive effect within studies of this Chicago program. Focus groups with recipients of Large Lots revealed that this resident-led beautification helped create a sense of place attachment and sense of community (Steward et al 2019), which could increase participation in future community-engagement activities (Manzo et al 2006). And though the decreased crime was found to be associated with decreased green space (Chen and Conroy 2023), it was also associated with improved visual quality (Hadavi et al 2021) and empowerment to take control of one’s own community (Rigolon et al 2021)(Rupp et al 2020).
Ownership Norms in Relation to Land Use
The previously mentioned benefits of this kind of city-mediated action are amazing but work off current assumptions of property. But what makes the city something that needs to be bought or a space occupation something that necessitates permission? Noterman (2021) explores how, in Philadelphia, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) organizes collective occupations to meet the immediate needs of the poor and houseless based on an understanding of a shared right to property. It suggests that everyday acts of repossession can shift our understanding of property and ownership, which begs the question: within Chicago, how do conceptions of individual property (like homes or yards) versus communal property (parks or community gardens) influence the types of action taken within the neighborhood at large? It also suggests that there may be some who seek to make change in their communities without permission (or DIY action), a phenomenon that also deserves attention to understand the full scope of resident-led city-shaping actions.
DIY ACTION
Increased research has been done on residents who take the state of their neighborhoods into their own hands, whether through “guerilla greening,” “spontaneous streetscaping,” or “aspirational urbanism,” and the way these forms of community engagement challenge the efficiency of normative structures dictating who has the right to change a neighborhoods infrastructure (Douglas 2014:6). Rather than getting permission from some city office, these people do it themselves, not willing to wait on the city’s bureaucratic processes to allow them to do what they want.
Research on this form of community engagement reveals that these populations are usually White, middle class, millennial renters (Thorpe 2018)(Douglas 2014), and the most important thing that many of these DIYers discuss is ownership. Their sense of ownership over property is derived through self-expression, which is made possible by their DIY efforts (Thorpe 2018). Coming back to ideas of trust, interviews with these residents who engage in DIY action reveal a divided response on whether they would prefer the city to make the changes that they are. There is a “widespread frustration with the bureaucracy of the planning processes and a common feeling that the city does not or would not do it right anyway” (Douglass 2014:16). Connecting this to the framework of trust developed earlier, this suggests that residents who participate in DIY action have less trust in their city government due to lack of competence and reliability.
In some forms of DIY action, such as street art, there is also an integral element of illegality that makes the act what it is (Chackal 2016). However, the interviews with average residents engaging in DIY action within the city revealed that most DIY actors aren’t intending to stir the pot—they just genuinely want to help the city based on specific problems they see, like potholes or a lack of bike lanes (Douglas 2014). What remains unexplored, is the way in which participation in DIY action influences the participation in city-mediated action. Even less explored, is the connection between actions and involvement without action, such as community-engaged planning.
COMMUNITY-ENGAGED PLANNING
Community-engaged planning refers to a form of urban planning that purposefully involves residents of the area being planned in the feedback and/or decision-making process (Patrick et al 2017). In 1989, Lalli and Thomas investigated public attitudes towards town planning measures in a city where there was a controversial development taking place. The findings revealed that the public opinion did not align with the official plans, indicating a discrepancy between public sentiment and the dominant perception portrayed in the media (Lalli and Thomas 1989). This provides a concrete example of why genuine public engagement is needed to create public spaces that serve what the public truly needs, especially if we aim to create more socially just and inclusive urban environments (Bonakdar and Audirac 2020). Increased research on this phenomenon of community-engaged planning has revealed that a multidimensional approach to planning is necessary, given that it is design’s interaction with culture that gives it meaning (Jabareen and Zilberman 2017).
Furthermore, community engagement has been shown to impact residents’ sense of ownership, which can be a powerful tool to create positive outcomes where communities may otherwise be negatively affected. For example, in Philadelphia residents around a new park were surveyed (91% of respondents were Black) and said that they felt they had a voice in what happened at the park and that it was a community asset (Mullenbach et al 2019). The significance of this finding is even more striking given the demographics of the survey and the “recent research on how park investments can negatively impact existing residents, especially low-income and ethnic minority residents'' (2019:213). This sense of ownership in process that was able to be developed will continue to take the forefront of discussions, especially as we consider the best available methods through which to engage residents.
We Will Chicago
A major recent example of community-engaged planning is The We Will Chicago Plan. The We Will Chicago Plan is “a 10-year framework to enhance citywide equity and resiliency,” created through “three years of intensive neighborhood-based and virtual public engagement” (City of Chicago 2022:5). It is a combination of goals, broken down into more tangible objectives, spread across major themes or “pillars” of concern for residents and community leaders created by diverse research teams of those stakeholders along with city staff and organization representatives selected from applications in 2021.[4] As of February 2023, the plan was adopted by the city council along with its policy recommendations, and the city has made some progress on each of these pillars already, which they have published online for residents to view (City of Chicago 2023). Little research has been done, however, on how this participatory process has left residents feeling, especially when compared to other ways in which they might go about influencing their communities.
Instances of Infectivity
Despite the positive elements that can come from citizen participation in planning, it is still contested in the literature about its overall value (Innes and Booher 2004). It has the potential to be counterproductive, encouraging polarizing discourse to make points heard and discouraging participation from residents who feel the process is just for show (ibid). Irvin and Stansbury (2004) recognize that there are situations where community participation is beneficial and when it is not. The problem with their analysis of these situations, however, is that they fail to ascribe a weight to the various costs and the benefits they lay out. Some of the key identifiers of communities that might not benefit from community participation, such as citizens being reluctant to get involved, the presence of many competing socio-economic groups, or low-income residents being key stakeholders, are descriptive of many, if not all, historically marginalized groups. It would then follow that these communities shouldn’t be engaged, when in reality, these are the communities where it is most needed to combat historical injustices. The authors raise valid concerns about whether this kind of engagement will be effective, however, which further incentivizes my research into how these communities might be shaping their neighborhoods in other ways.
Determinants of Involvement
When community-engaged planning is made available and advertised to residents, participation is not always guaranteed. Examining the intersection of urban planning and sociological research from the past few decades, reveals that “thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about…local community places…[influence] whether and how we might participate in local planning efforts,” especially place attachment (Manzo and Perkins 2006:336). Place attachment, in addition to being caused by the increased ownership of once-vacant lots (Stewart 2019) is driven primarily by elements of the built environment (Leyden et al 2011). In fact, spatial variables, such as place attachment, building density, and public transport, have been found to have a larger impact on participation overall than any socio-demographic factors (Bottini 2018). This means that most determinants of involvement are environmental such as quality shared public spaces (Zhu 2015). This can pose a challenge in a city like Chicago, where the voices that need to be amplified the most are those whose environments have historically been treated in ways which make place attachment harder to form and thus participation less likely.
In summary, I employ the terms city-mediated action, DIY action, and community-engaged planning to describe the various engagement practices currently being used by residents and planners. In the next chapter, I unpack the various methods I use to examine trust and ownership across the city of Chicago.