How do discrepancies between ward boundaries and community area boundaries influence trust?
Another point of interest within the city of Chicago is the role of the community area versus the ward. Chicago has 77 community areas and 50 legislative wards, and the lines that separate these are not the same. Legislative wards are drawn and redrawn by the city government with fluctuations in population and demographic changes while community area boundaries have remained consistent since the 1920s (Chicago Studies), which means that many community areas fall within multiple wards, and most wards contain more than one community area. This is related to Jane Jacobs’s (1961) theories about potential challenges to make change at the district level (in this case the ward) when there are conflicting interests at the street neighborhood level (in this case, the community areas). To examine this potential phenomenon in Chicago, I counted how many wards each community area was divided into, with the results displayed in Table 2.
These results show that there are only 4 community areas in Chicago that are entirely within one ward, with the most common degree of division for community areas being 4 wards. Over 60% of community areas (47) are divided into 4-8 wards. These divisions fall across the city without any notable geographical patterns (Figure 9). To examine whether these division differences played a major role in trust or ownership, I compared the degree of divisions that a community experienced to the trust in the local government that the community area expressed. The results for this are shown in Figure 10. Across division degrees there is no clear correlation between the number of divisions a community area experiences from ward divisions and the trust in the local government.
To examine if there is any potential relationship between sense of ownership and the degree of divisions in a community area, I compare the division degree of each community area with the litter rates. Once again, there is no clear correlation between the degree of divisions a community area experiences and the level of cleanliness (Figure 11). In effect, there are no major differences in ownership and trust between community areas based on the amount of ward divisions. This suggests that the challenges that Jacobs (1961) suggests regarding competing interests at intersections within the various community levels within a city are not significantly associated with trust or sense of ownership.
