Quantitative Considerations

These responses prompted me to examine how opportunities to engage in communal ownership might vary in concentration across the city, as communal ownership was a concept primarily expressed by residents living on the North side. Given that several interviewees chose to speak unprompted about communal ownership in reference to parks, I chose to examine available park data to estimate the opportunities to participate in contributing to community ownership. Based on data from the Chicago Parks Department, I plotted maps showing the distribution of parks by number of parks (Figure 13) and by the amount of acreage (Figure 14). In Figure 13, it appears that there is a higher concentration of parks on the North than on the South or West sides. When looking at exact numbers, the South has 247 parks, while the North has 240 and the West has 169. It would appear from mere totals that the South has more parks and thus more opportunities for this key expression of communal ownership, however it should be noted that the South has 10 more community areas within it than the North. Therefore, to better understand the park distribution, we should examine how the parks are distributed by the number of community areas within the region for a more accurate understanding of park availability.

Looking at the average number of parks per community area, the North takes the lead with 10, while the West comes in at 8.9 and the South averages 7.5.[1] The discrepancies are further visible when examining the maximum number of parks in a community within each of these regions. In the North the highest number of parks within a community area is 23; in the West that number is 20, while in the South that number is only 14. This suggests that community areas in the South and West have fewer parks, and these numbers are distributed more evenly across the region, while in the North there are more parks in a few community areas that elevate the figures for the entire region. Those patterns are visible in Figure 13. I further investigated the amount of land allocated to these parks in Figure 14, and found the acreage concentrated on the eastern border of the city. Because Chicago has an open lakefront across this border, which counts as a park, most of the acreage is concentrated along this side and these findings are less insightful to the distribution within the city.

Overall, however, these findings regarding the distribution of parks across community areas in Chicago along with residents’ perceptions regarding the role participation in the care of these parks play in their enactment of ownership are significant. If communal ownership is formed in the context of communal property, then—while there are certainly other factors also at play—it follows that communal ownership likely suffers when parks are less available, such as in the South region of Chicago.