Metropolitics

Sale of the Century: Chicago's Infrastructure Deals and the Privatization State

Philip Ashton & Marc Doussard & Rachel Weber — 2020-11-24T06:00:00Z

Since 2004, the City of Chicago has been engaged in a new wave of infrastructure privatizations, selling concessions to financial institutions. Philip Ashton, Marc Doussard and Rachel Weber analyze the consequences of these transfers in detail, in terms of both public action and the impact on users, and identify lessons to be learned from this new way of doing things, whereby firms mine the city for potential revenue streams.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization When the City

- From the Field / financialization, privatization, infrastructure, infrastructures, urban services, Chicago, United States

Confronting Police Violence and an Unjust Justice System

Michele Graham — 2020-05-19T05:00:00Z

We publish Michele Graham's review of the 2018 book The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City as Black people in the US again endure the trauma of a murder in their community at the hands of police officers. Graham's reflections on the authors' findings (drawn from a neighborhood study in Chicago) emphasize the continuing legacies of historically racist policing, racist prosecution practices and racist incarceration patterns in the United States. The review

- Reviews / police violence, United States, Chicago, incarceration, prison, Black neighborhoods, neighborhood, justice, discriminatory policing, brutality

Understanding School Closures in Chicago: A Review of Eve Ewing's Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Ryan M. Good — 2019-12-17T06:00:00Z

Eve Ewing's Ghosts in the Schoolyard portrays recent school reform efforts in Chicago through the eyes of those devastated by the imposition of “choice” and “market discipline” in public education.
The great deceit of marketized education reform—and the mass school closures such reforms produce in communities like Chicago's Bronzeville—is the suggestion that the introduction of choice and market discipline can undo histories of racism that have systematically disadvantaged communities of

- Reviews / United States, Chicago, race, racism, school, education, education reform

Race and Progressive Politics in Chicago

John J. Betancur & Leonor Vanik — 2019-01-09T06:00:00Z

The progressive movement in Chicago may not be as broad-minded as depicted in the academic literature. Racial polarization based on plantation politics are part of a strategy the Democratic machine used to drive a wedge in mayoral campaigns, yet additional factors are contributing toward a multifaceted fragmentation of progressives as a movement as outlined in mainstream literature.
---- Series: Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements This article examines progressive politics in

- From the Field / Chicago, United States, progressive urban politics, race, local politics, mayors, progressive mayors

The Everyday Activism of Chicago's Public High-School Football Coaches

Lawrence Johnson — 2018-03-13T06:00:00Z

For several generations, high-school football programs have been an important part of the social fabric in economically challenged Chicago neighborhoods. Sociologist Lawrence Johnson, himself a former player in the Chicago Public League, draws on in-depth interviews with coaches and players to conclude that policies being pursued by city officials in the name of educational choice and reform are ripping this fabric apart.
A tearing social fabric
Ebony Magazine published an article in 1963

- From the Field / Chicago, sport, education, school, education reform, social networks, high-school football, football coaches, school restructuring

The Actually Existing Markets of Shrinking Cities

Joshua Akers — 2017-04-18T05:00:00Z

In a bid to halt urban decline, Michigan's state government sought to create incentives for the creation of urban homesteads by accelerating the tax-foreclosure process. But what happens when city and county administrations don't play ball—and what are their motivations for doing so? Joshua Akers examines the adverse effects of a market-centric public policy.
---- Series: Shrinking Cities In the late 1990s, the state of Michigan bet on markets and urban pioneers to reinvigorate its struggling

- From the Field / housing, Chicago, housing policy, Los Angeles, real estate, public policy, foreclosure, Detroit, evictions, Michigan, shrinking cities, urban decline, urban homesteading, housing markets, Flint, homestead

Restless Cities

Laura Wolf-Powers — 2016-10-25T05:00:00Z

The world of downtown real-estate development seems to have a life of its own, independent of demand for space and animated by financialization and public subsidy. Commenting on Rachel Weber's book From Boom to Bubble, Laura Wolf‑Powers wonders what the creation of 20 million square feet of office space and 34,000 housing units in downtown Chicago during the 2000s has to say about urban redevelopment more broadly.
Obscure news items like this one—“Aramark moving Schuylkill-side as downtown

- Reviews / Chicago, United States, urban development, real estate, asset bubbles

The Intimate Politics of Public Housing's Demise

Dory Thrasher — 2016-04-12T05:00:00Z

Many ethnographies have documented the physical and institutional fragility of America's public housing. Writing in a different idiom, anthropologist Catherine Fennell opens a line of inquiry into how encounters with physical things—buildings and building systems—forge bonds of sympathy between and among housing residents, bureaucrats, and members of the broader public. Registering and interpreting these sympathetic encounters, Fennell's study of Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, the “last project

- Reviews / Chicago, social housing, public housing, welfare state, public-housing redevelopment

All the Gayborhoods are White

Marcus Anthony Hunter — 2015-05-19T05:00:00Z

The urban “gayborhood,” the place where gay men and women found refuge for their sexuality from bigotry, is gradually changing demographically and culturally in today's “post-gay” era. In his review of Amin Ghaziani's book about the implications behind this transition, sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter considers the omission of race from our understanding of the traditional gayborhood, and reflects on the role of social exclusion in urban spaces characterized by their inclusion of marginalized

- Reviews / gentrification, Chicago, gender, United States, homosexuality, exclusion, neighborhood, race, gay, LGBTQ+, gay flight, gayborhood

The importance of the neighborhood in Chicago and elsewhere

Eliza Benites-Gambirazio — 2014-03-19T05:55:00Z

The latest work by Robert Sampson, released to positive reviews, shows the sustainable effects of internal social dynamics within neighborhoods in terms of the vulnerability of their residents and the reproduction of these dynamics over time. It calls for action to be taken as a matter of priority to change the way social life is organized in underprivileged neighborhoods.
Published in 2012, Robert Sampson's book immediately became a must-read of American sociology for those who are

- Reviews / ghetto, segregation, Chicago, inequalities, United States, neighborhood, Chicago School, neighborhood effects