Why Chicago?
There are several qualities that make Chicago an excellent city to study elements related to the engagement of residents in shaping their communities, one of the foremost being its extensive history with urban planning. Additionally, considerations of the city’s divides further structure it as a fitting environment to study ownership and trust.
Historical Setting
The first reason Chicago is an interesting place to study these questions is its unique story of growth and history in relation to urban planning. In the early 1800s, Chicago was a very small city on Lake Michigan, and the country didn’t expect she would amount to anything extraordinary like New York or Philadelphia; however, by the end of the 1800s it was the second largest American city in terms of population and considered one of the top five cities in the world (Philpott 1978). This fast growth was not without consequence, and overcrowding in poor areas of the city caused a massive fire in 1871, where it’s estimated around one third of people lost their homes and thousands more lost significant portions of money. Some of these monetary losses impacted the upper class, who after the fire started to pay attention to the overcrowded slums of their city, but it wasn't enough to make them care about drastically improving the quality of life there (ibid). Instead, their attention, as well as that of the media, was on the real Chicago—that is, the areas occupied by the wealthy and upper class. Reporters rarely wrote about the neighborhoods of the working class, unless it was to report on a crime (ibid). This interaction between the haves and the have-nots is necessary to understanding the important connection between the city of Chicago and the history of planning. Almost as fast as Chicago’s growth was the speed with which wealthy residents realized planning the future of their city would be necessary to support its expansion (McCabe 2016). The 1871 fire gave Chicago an opportunity, unlike other U.S. cities at that time, to implement visionary planning ideas such as the gridded streets and the Chicago River’s development; however, those ideas rarely took into consideration, let alone focused on, the experiences or needs of Chicago’s poor, Black, and immigrant populations.
A perfect example of this issue is present in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Exposition was designed to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas and to showcase American excellence in power and innovation. Overseen by Daniel Burnham, this fair is credited as being a critical point in the development of the vision for what American cities should be and the City Beautiful movement, a concept that the design of cities and social issues could not be separated (McBrien 2022; Blumberg and Yalzadeh 2019). In theory, this could be interpreted as a net positive. More and more contemporary research continues to affirm the important impact that city environments have on residents' physical health, social well-being, and overall quality of life (Sampson, Morenoff, and Ganon-Rowley 2002; Leyden 2003; Srinivasan, O’Fallon, and Dearry 2003), but at that point in history the City Beautiful movement mostly benefited those who fit within the vision of the “White city” as Burnham’s famous world’s fair grounds came to be called (McBrien 2022). This nickname had more to do with the white Neoclassical architecture that dominated the grounds than race, but unintentionally and unfortunately also reflects the deeper priorities of those who had power to shape cities around the world, and especially in Chicago.
As Progressive-era reformers arose and began to take interest in city slums in the early 1900s, the question of whether people shaped their environments, or their environments shaped them began to be debated (McCabe 2016). While this question of whether it was nature or nurture dominating the slums wasn’t yet settled, most reformers were united in their belief and fear that the slums were a net negative to, not only those who lived within them, but to the entire city and collective society (ibid). They needed to be able to institute plans that dictated what happened in their city and where, but at the turn of the 20th century they didn’t have the power to declare zoning regulations, which meant that they needed the public’s buy-in (Schlereth 1983). After the city’s elites commissioned Daniel Burnham to create the 1909 Plan of Chicago, they turned to Walter Dwight Moody to create a large-scale promotional campaign aimed at convincing voters—particularly those who were “property owners or tenants who paid more than $25 or more per month in rent” --- to support the plan, about 165,000 Chicago residents in total (ibid: 72). However, since most minority residents weren’t property owners and lived in low-income housing (McCabe 2016), it’s reasonable to expect that they were not targeted in this campaign to get the city on board with these plans.
As time progressed, Chicago continued to march forward with its plans for growth, often at the expense of the marginalized. Highways were built that divided neighborhoods and forced evictions in the name of “urban renewal” (Metropolitan Planning Council 2020). Redlining[1], housing covenants[2], and blockbusting[3]—a nationwide practice believed to have been started in Chicago (City of Chicago 2022)—maintained and exacerbated the color lines of an already segregated city, particularly on the South and West sides of Chicago (Bennett, Hartley, and Rose 2022). Today, in spite of Chicago being ranked as one of the most diverse cities in America, it is also the most segregated (Dodge 2015). Low-income and Black communities remain concentrated in the South and West sides of the city, where lack of investment has resulted in city-owned vacant lots sitting unused and overgrown, cutting up neighborhoods, and industrial-based pollution contributing to huge neighborhood-based health disparities and huge gaps in life expectancy between races (City of Chicago 2022).
The good news is that this is not where the story of Chicago and planning ends. In recent years, there has been more interest from city leaders in making up for the harms of the past by intentionally including considerations of diversity and equity in planning (Kwon and Nguyen 2023; Krumholz and Hexter 2022; Krumholz and Forester 2011). If urban planning hopes to be able to plan cities effectively for all people, it will require re-examining the roles that trust and ownership have come to play in determining the participation of residents in these processes, as well as the role these elements have come to play in how planners interpret and implement that engagement into their final designs. My research seeks to contribute to this area by studying the experiences of planners and residents who have taken part in these processes in recent years, and Chicago’s history with urban planning, in both its early opportunities for innovation and its infliction of hardship upon the poor and minority races, makes it a fascinating place to begin this investigation.
Neighborhood Structure
Along with its historical background, the city of Chicago also has clearly defined ward and community area boundaries that make it an interesting place to study ownership and trust. In addition to people identifying themselves as residents of Chicago, they may also identify themselves as belonging to a particular neighborhood, community area, or ward.
While neighborhoods are less easily defined by smaller groupings, they typically fall within a community area or ward boundary, two units of community measurement that I will use throughout this thesis. Community areas are slices of the city originally mapped out by UChicago sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess in the late 1920s (Chicago Studies 2020). These 77 groups, barring the additions of O’Hare and Edgewater in 1956 and 1980 respectively, have had consistent boundaries since their inception (ibid). Because these boundaries are relatively static, they can be used as a means of measuring how different factors change over time, such as the Hardship Index, vacancy, trust in the local government, etc. The other unit for communities within the cities are wards. Chicago has 50 wards that encompass the city, and whose boundaries are decided politically by a vote of city council members. Each ward is represented by an alderman who is elected by the people of the ward and is meant to represent the interests of their ward within the city council, a body composed entirely of the aldermen and the mayor (who is a non-voting member of this body) (Office of the City Clerk, 2024). While these boundaries can change regularly (the last change was approved by Chicago city council on May 16th, 2022, during the time of this study) they are the unit of community through which political power and decision making is exercised.
These two modes of community structure—community areas and wards—make it interesting to study Chicago for its overlap of obvious divisions between divides of political power versus divides of social cohesion in the context of sense of ownership and trust. If the divides in social cohesion do not align with the divides of political power, it could lead to challenges in working together to make changes.