1 Dimitri Nesbitt, Josh Hankins, Nick Rockway UPP501 10/11/2021 Group Project Part 1: Describing and Explaining Urban Spatial Form in Douglas
Nick Rockway’s Section: Political Economy and Urban Ecology: Douglas as a Process The spatial arrangements of the Douglas community area have been formed and reformed over the last century and a half according to a wide confluence of historical and social processes. At first, the land comprising Douglas was a wealthy slaveowner’s estate. Then it was a prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War. Next, it was an upwardly mobile community of working class Jewish, German, Scottish, Irish and English residents, and finally a predominantly African-American community which has itself undergone a series of radical changes over the past century. This section seeks to connect social process and spatial form, to show how Douglas’s spatial arrangements have been formed, destroyed, and recreated according to particular historical processes; processes which have become imprinted on, and are part and parcel to, the built environment. To analyze how social and historical processes have been actualized through Douglas’s spatial form, I will consider the Marxian political-economic framework of analysis advanced by the likes of David Harvey and Neil Smith while also considering Mike Davis’s contributions to the ‘meaning’ of built environments. I will contrast this framework with the urban ecology of Ernest Burgess and Robert Park and determine how useful each mode of analysis is in describing and situating Douglas’s spatial arrangements. First, I will discuss the overall logic behind each framework as it has been advanced by the aforementioned urban theorists, then apply each framework toward an analysis of Douglas and end with a discussion of how useful each framework is in describing Douglas’s spatial form.
2 I will first begin with Marxian political economy. I add the term ‘Marxian’ to this framework due to the fact that David Harvey, Neil Smith and Mike Davis all follow in the tradition of analysis first espoused by Karl Marx and outlined in his works on the matter, Das Kapital and Grundrisse. Broadly speaking, such a framework incorporates an integrative analysis of economy, society, and politics, so-called material forces, and their historical evolution over time. The backdrop of this analysis is the class struggle, that the antagonism between labor and capital (the proletariat and bourgeoisie) is the engine that drives society. This antagonism, to a Marxist geographer like Harvey or Smith, becomes realized in spatial form which is created through its connection to social, political-economic processes taking place in the community and in the world at large.1 For instance, Neil Smith’s theory of the process of gentrification is that it can be better explained by the economic impetus for developers to seek the potential extraction of surplus profit from underserved communities and be supported by political apparatuses rather than by a ‘consumer choice’ to desire an urban environment instead of a suburban one. 2 Furthermore, gentrification is a process that is informed by historical antecedents such as capital flight and redlining, and does not merely occur in a bubble. Urban ecology, as advanced by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, sought to analyze the urban environment by drawing parallels between processes of the natural world and urban social life using the city of Chicago as their laboratory. According to the urban ecology framework, urban space is divided into distinctive ‘ecological niches’ in which people with similar social characteristics are grouped together within the same spatial dimensions due to competition with other groups over scarce resources and land. These groups, within this model, tend to fall along race and class lines. This notion of urban ecology is 1
David Harvey, “Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form,” Transforming Cities, 2005, pp. 31-39. Neil Smith, “From Consumer Sovereignty to the Rent Gap,” in The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996), pp. 51-74. 2
3 perhaps best represented in Burgess’s ‘concentric zone model’, a highly influential theoretical model of urban structures, yet one that has seen criticism from contemporary urban theorists. As with Marxist political economy, urban ecology is process-driven, that urban form is dynamic and ever changing. The city is not merely a set of fixed structures but is perpetually formed by a variety of processes. To the Marxist, these processes are social, historical, political and economic. To the urban ecologist, they are processes abstracted from natural phenomena and ‘competition’ is the driving force. With that overview of these two competing, yet related, analytical frameworks, I will now move to using each framework to analyze the Douglas community area. To apply the Marxist political-economic framework to Douglas, especially as it has been outlined by David Harvey in his essay “ Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form”, I will consider how Douglas’s built form has paralleled its peopling by African-American migrants during the Great Migration and according to processes taking place during the middle twentieth century. Prior to the massive influx of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South, Douglas was a multiethnic community, as discussed earlier and elaborated on more in depth in my memo. Yet, in the popular imagination of Chicagoans today, it is a ‘Black neighborhood’ on the South Side. Derived from one historical process, the migration of African-Americans to the North, are many more which have had a profound impact on Douglas’s built form. In addition to David Harvey’s theorization of social process and built form, I will apply Mike Davis’s notion of ‘fortress cities’.3 In and of itself, Douglas is like a fortress. However, unlike the fortresses of Los Angeles discussed by Mike Davis, this fortress has more to do with keeping people in than keeping people out. In this way, perhaps it is more like a prison than a fortress. Nonetheless, the Dan Ryan Expressway functions like a wall to keep African-Americans segregated in ‘their’ 3
Mike Davis, “‘Fortress L.A.,’” The City Reader, 2011, pp. 195-201.
4 community and away from the predominantly white Armour Square and Bridgeport. The expressway’s physical form, in one part functions as a means to divide neighborhoods on the basis of race, parallels prevailing social processes in the United States. Racial segregation in the Northern United States was not codified into law in the same way that it was in the South, yet political and economic actors nonetheless did their part in upholding white supremacy and the relegation of the African-American other into the ‘ghetto’ with few social or economic opportunities available to them. On a large scale, this can be seen in Chicago’s entire socio-spatial environment as a city divided by race between white and Black, between north and south. As such, this line of demarcation, the I-90 Expressway, is not purely coincidental, but is by design. As African-American social life encroached upon white neighborhoods, governmental and business actors took it upon themselves to recreate segregation by constructing an impossible-to-cross barrier. Image: A view of Chicago’s South Side. In pink are former housing projects dominated by African-American residents, in blue is Hyde Park, the heavily-policed site of the University of Chicago, and in orange are major highways. This image shows how the Dan Ryan Expressway functions as a wall to separate African-Americans to the east with whites to the west. A notable contrast is Stateway Gardens which is immediately east of Comiskey Park, though nonetheless separated by the Dan Ryan. Source: NPR, Look at This, “Demolished”, 2014.
5 Beyond the Dan Ryan’s function as a wall between Black and white, a dominant feature of Douglas’s built form is the presence of the ‘towers in the park’ architectural typology — as well as the physical scars left on the landscape as vacant lots following their demolition. Douglas is comprised of many of these tower complexes including, but not limited to, Prairie Shores, Lake Meadows, Dearborn Homes, and the former sites of Stateway Gardens, the Robert Taylor Homes and the Harold L. Ickes Homes.4 All of these complexes were initially constructed as part of an urban renewal effort to clear slum-like conditions and to house African-Americans without allowing them to leave the traditional Black Belt. According to these intertwined processes, urban renewal and structural racism toward African-Americans, Douglas’s built environment was recreated as a place brimming with ‘towers in the park’ public housing projects. Over time, this typology was deemed a failure for housing low income African-Americans and many of the complexes were demolished or converted to market-rate housing.5 This political-economic change of heart parallels the ascendance of neoliberal economics and has helped transform Douglas into a community area ripe for gentrification. Stateway Gardens was torn down and replaced by $500,000 low-rise condominiums. Prairie Shores has been converted into market-rate apartments that predominantly house students at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From the mid-century ethos of public housing and racial segregation to the contemporary notion of neoliberalism and gentrification, we can see how social, political and ecomic processes have paralleled the construction, destruction and recreation of Douglas’s spatial form. The high-rise public housing project and its conversion to ‘trendy’ market-rate apartments serves as a microcosm for this transition. 4
The latter two are technically just outside of Douglas’s officially designated borders, yet they are all adjacent to the Dan Ryan Expressway along State Street and all were part of the same plan to rehouse African-Americans in separate locations from whites. 5 Interestingly enough though, an architectural ‘success’ for people of means. Many modernist high-rises in Chicago and the rest of the United States house well-off people; many countries around the world have successfully housed their population in such projects.
6
Image: Prairie Shores and South Commons developments in Douglas. Once public housing complexes predominantly occupied by low-income African-Americans, they have since been converted into market-rate apartments that draw higher income residents and students attending the Illinois Institute of Technology. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Alfred Twu, 2015.
Next, I will consider how the urban ecology framework espoused by Ernest Burgess and Robert Park may be applied to Douglas to explain its spatial dimensions, especially in regard to segregation and the influx of African-Americans following the Great Migration. Under such a framework, segregation is a natural process facilitated by a competition between various actors who are grouped together on the basis of their race-class background and compete with each other for limited resources such as jobs and land. The spatial realization of this competition is a city divided into various ‘zones’ radiating out from the central business district. 6 Within each zone are ethnic enclaves such as a Chinatown or a Little Italy, recent immigrant communities, in the so-called ‘zone of transition’ adjacent to the central business district, or a Deutschland 6
Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” Urban Ecology, 1935, pp. 71-78, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73412-5_5.
7 district in the working-men’s zone after German immigrants underwent a stage of ‘succession’ and secured higher wages.
Ernest Burgess’s Concentric Zone Model created in 1925. It attempts to explain how social groups within cities are spatially arranged according to his theorization of urban ecology.
Complicating this zonal model, however, are disturbances to the city’s ‘metabolism’. That is to say that metabolism relates to ‘natural’ population growth, defined by Burgess as the excess of birth rates over death rates, and a disturbance in metabolism derives from a massive influx of people, such was the case during the Great Migration. Additionally, ecological succession parallels social mobility in which race-class groups secure higher wages and move to a zone further away from the core. A so-called metabolic ‘abnormality’ as Burgess calls it produced the Black Belt of Chicago, a zone which wedges out from the zone of transition into the
8 working-men’s and residential zones nor has experienced succession in the way that other communities have. As such, the racial segregation and economic impoverishment of Douglas and the Black Belt is a natural process, though an abnormality within the urban ecosystem. Robert Park elaborated on this idea, indicating that dominant groups have out-competed weaker ones and the system of urban apartheid in Chicago becomes the natural, logical spatial reality, limiting succession yet keeping the ecosystem in homeostasis.7 I have used two analytical frameworks, Marxist political economy and urban ecology, to examine the spatial dimensions of Douglas. Both frameworks are process-driven but utilize wildly different processes toward discussing the socio-spatial makeup of a community and how it developed over time. For urban ecologists, competition between race-class groups is the engine that drives spatial processes, processes abstracted from ecological principles. Under political economy, contradiction between capital and labor drives spatial processes, a grand scale process informed by social, political, economic and historical processes which work together dialectically, in opposition to and part and parcel of, to constitute spatial form. Although both are process-driven and quantitatively rigorous frameworks, they arrive at different conclusions as to ‘how’ Douglas’s spatial form has been produced over time. In the political-economic framework, Douglas’s built form is constitutive of the many contradictory social processes taking place in different historical moments, inside and outside the community area’s boundaries. To the urban ecologist, its built and social forms are the result of natural processes observable in natural ecosystems. In this way, processes that played a major role in developing Douglas such as redlining, blockbusting, urban renewal and gentrification are natural and predetermined by forces beyond anyone’s control. Furthermore, the urban ecologist might argue that social constructs and modes of production are superseded by this biologically deterministic notion that humans are 7
Robert Ezra Park, “Human Ecology,” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 1 (1936): pp. 1-15..
9 ‘competitively cooperative’ and that this logic informs socio-spatial processes more than anything else. With this in mind, I feel that the political-economic framework is a more useful mode of analysis for discussing urban space, that tracing the interconnections between social process and spatial form provides more clear, objective insight into how the planner might intervene in the construction of socially just spaces. I will not wholly discredit the urban ecology framework as we certainly do live in a complex environment that in some way mirrors processes present in the natural realm. Nonetheless, I find the abstraction of natural processes to be quite reductive. There is nothing ‘natural’ about segregation, modes of production, gentrification or poverty. As such, the conclusions drawn from such a framework are misleading.
Dimitri’s Section: Racialized Political Economy and Urban Form As indicated above, adopting the concentric zone models of urban sociology from Ernest Burgess for Douglas is a contentious process. The application is inconsistent at best because, while Douglas and neighboring areas factored heavily into the model’s design specifics, multiple Douglases have existed temporally and spatially that complicate the analysis. In the mid- to late-1800s, when Douglas was a peripheral area to the Loop, its transit connections were much more relevant. This features in Burgess’ context, where the circulation of the day helped determine the succession of neighborhoods and the appropriate zone typology. A passenger stop for the Illinois Central Railroad was located there and a “growing number of streetcar lines drew a wide range of Chicagoans,” to Douglas.8 But, as with the application for many other cities that have grown in scale and complexity since, the Burgess model falters quite resoundingly.
8
Capehart, A. (2004). Douglas, Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago History Museum.
10 The spatial segregation and congregation of Black residents in early Chicago history just south of the Loop provided Burgess with a new feature for his urban sociology. Douglas formed part of a string of South Side neighborhoods where forces preventing social integration inspired the inclusion of the “Black Belt” on the concentric circles model. The Belt, while built upon an offensively essentialist understanding of Black life, does allude to two critical considerations: 1) the Belt’s suspension among the circles indicates an alternative neighborhood succession and 2) that, when acknowledging minoritized geographies on the model, the Belt’s deliberate separation references the structural reality that social assimilation was not afforded to Black residents. These visual cues differ from Burgess’ framework that considers the model’s boundaries as porous lines, including the Belt. His musings described Black people as those wanting to live in “free and disorderly” communities, instead of recognizing the systemic impositions to the apparent “freedom.” For Douglas, as the historic center of the Black Metropolis, both segregation and congregation play critical roles in defeating Burgess’ generalizations and also take on new meaning when considering the political economy on global scales. Douglas’ Black history is an enduring characteristic of its neighborhoods and is a critical part of the urbanism story for Chicago. As noted, the Burgess concentric zone model represents static spatial organization, alluding to a notion that zones, enclaves, and the mapped relationships are omnipresent and invariable. The context of socio-spatial development, however, is necessary for assessing a place’s positionalities. In this manner, Saskia Sassen’s discussions on global cities can organize temporal conditions into present structures. Sassen offers a framework of global cities and urban socioeconomics restructuring that helps define Douglas in an alternative way that acknowledges Blackness as the community asset it is.
11 Global cities, themselves, are actors within and reproducers of a system of interrelated connections and contributions that span the globe. Their development comes from globalizing forces that intensify in urban centers that are better equipped to fulfill the delivery of services to and from an influential services sector.9 In turn, these systems reconfigure the spatial relationships and definitions of what centrality can be. Sassen notes that this occurs on all geographic scales, in which “regionally oriented firms [not negotiating] the complexities of international borders and the regulations of different countries, are still faced with a regionally dispersed network of operations that requires centralized control and servicing.”10 For Douglas, this lower-level application of Sassen’s ideas is the basis for its participation in the Black experience beginning in 1852. That year, its namesake, Stephen A. Douglas, established the first connection the community area had with Black identity—that of a slaver sympathizer and anti-abolitionist.11 His efforts to establish a luxury residential community are one component of social polarity. Conversely, the efforts of abolitionist and Union soldiers, however, are embedded in four square blocks in Douglas. This refers to Camp Douglas, an important site for Union efforts during the Civil War and among the few places that trained Black soldiers to participate in emancipation.12 Of course, the world at this time was not globalizing and the neoliberal methods of capitalism indicative of it were not yet established. Still, the war preparations involved a national reordering of its regions, in which places like Douglas and Chicago became concentrations of resources and bodies. 9
Sassen, S. (2001). The impact of new technologies and globalization on cities, in LeGates, R. T. and Stout, F. (eds.) The City Reader, Sixth Edition, (pp. 650-658). Routledge. New York. 10 Ibid. 11 Capehart, A. (2004). Douglas 12 Keller, D.L. (2013). Camp Douglas: September 1861-December 1865 (A Chicago story that must be told), Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation, (pp. 4-11), Chicago Historical Society.
12 Socially, this modality behind this densification coincides with Sassen’s writings of how urban centers utilize regional networks of connectivity to deliver services. Thanks to Stephen Douglas’ efforts in establishing railroad infrastructure, Chicago was better positioned than most Image: Camp Douglas in September 1864 looking southwest. The camp was among the first spatial reorderings in Douglas that produced resources for a scalar conflict. Source: Chicago Historical Society, in Camp Douglas, 2013.
to receive Black folks fleeing the South and the city’s large resident population—recorded at 109,260 in 1860—meant existing institutional resources could be accessible.1314 Camp Douglas assisted in connecting Black people to services like financial management and healthcare that they may have never been formally proximate to. Chicago, then, can be characterized as one of Sassen’s secondary cities for this era, and Douglas as an active participant in global city-building. The city’s institutions had integrated the call for resource use for a war that redefined its regional importance. Douglas, meanwhile, was not initially a part of Chicago, but comprised a peripheral locality whose relationship to the urban core was one intensifying resources for national systems. The resulting urban form is one 13
Knight, M. (2015). Chicago’s forgotten Civil War prison camp, WBEZ Chicago, Chicago Public Media, Inc. Released Mar. 11, 2015. Audio. 14 Kelly, D. (1989). A History of Camp Douglas, Illinois, Union Prison, 1861-1865, National Park Service, Southeast Region, United States Department of the Interior, select pages.
13 where the Douglas locality produced resources for Chicago, which intensified its systems to deliver services on the national level. Secondly, after the war, with the start of the Great Migration in about 1905, a more literal interpretation of Sassen’s ideas is embodied by the development of Bronzeville, whose cultural and economic center was squarely within Douglas. Stephen A. Douglas’ rail connections transported thousands of newly emancipated Black Americans to Chicago, who encountered a hostile social fabric by the white working-class protective of their built environment. Douglas and its neighbors became the only viable place for Black futurity—“racism had greeted [B]lack [people] in Chicago, shunting them into a long, narrow neighborhood south of the Loop. ‘There was Bronzeville…and there was the rest of Chicago for whites.’”15
Image: “Segregation kept the Black community from living outside certain boundaries, but it didn’t deter them from creating a robust business community.” Source: Chicago Historical Society, in WTTW, n.d.
Despite the calculated marginalization of Black bodies, Blackness, itself, thrived through systems of solidarity, cultural expression, and entrepreneurship.
15
Grossman, R. (2012). The creative stew that was Bronzeville, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 12 Issue. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-per-flash-bronzeville-20120212-story.html
14 Two of Sassen’s ideas apply in the Bronzeville condition: 1) the increased social inequality that develops simultaneously as global cities further intensify, and 2) the specialization of services accumulates in geographic nodes that become competitive.16 While the intersection of then-mercantilism and segregation is not the Sassen framework for Douglas, the point made is that financial services were so racialized in growing Chicago that inequality was structurally furthered by the delivery of them. In fact, these beliefs are so embedded into structures of urban development that Bronzeville residents still encounter underappraisal, limited financing, and unwarranted blight claims.17 The relegation of Black residents into Douglas can be understood as deliberate choices from a services industry interested in maintaining a delivery of services for white Chicagoans. Therefore, as Black people were integrated into the institutions of intensifying influence as the city grew, yet their positionality remained one of subservience and marginalization.
Image: Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender printed newspaper was an endeavor indicative of Douglas’ economic, political, and cultural success with Black Americans well beyond Chicago. Source: The LIFE Images Collection, Getty, in The Exemplary Legacy of the Chicago Defender, 2019.
16
Sassen, S. (2001). The impact of new technologies and globalization on cities Moore, N. (2021). Racial Inequality in How Chicago-Area Homes Are Valued is Increasing, WBEZ Chicago, Chicago Public Media, Inc. 17
15
However, at the same time, Bronzeville was the culmination of many of these similar forces that had become specialized in supporting competitiveness for Black residents. The presence of strong community networks, like congregations, ushered a new urban form where Black inventors, activists, visual and musical artists, and business owners were in one district.1819 Black-owned banks helped stabilize Black residences, finance Black businesses, and promote Black culture. This density allowed for Blackness to develop unapologetically, despite its disenfranchisement. The creative contributions, too, were attractive for non-Black communities who would regularly frequent Bronzeville institutions like the Savoy Ballroom. Both undulations of Sassen’s notes on the spatiality of inequality can be observed in Bronzeville. Douglas’ prior residents had left both tenement housing and architectural mansions behind, Black newcomers transformed the area into a mixed-income community with “poverty-stricken families living side-by-side with successful entrepreneurs.”20 Thus, the urban organization that delivered services for wealthier residents completed by working-class residents, is the same spatial condition that, through segregationist ideals, intensified systems within Douglas. The final relationship from Sassen’s cities involves contextualizing Douglas as a restorative neighborhood that can mitigate the inequalities exacerbated by globalization—the same that have transformed Chicago into a global city. The historical and continued marginalization of Black communities indicates that a new planning practice—one built on advocacy and participatory method—is how Black futurity can be realized. This is not the focus of Sassen’s work but is compatible within the framework of global cities as it represents a 18
Capehart, A. (2004). Douglas Grossman, R. (2012). The creative stew that was Bronzeville 20 Grossman, R. (2012). The creative stew that was Bronzeville 19
16 grassroots positionality as respondent to a globalized structure. In a modern context, this means preserving a version of Bronzeville that celebrated its historic adaptability, while resisting the historic practices that segregated it into being.
Image: 35th and State streets in 1953 (top) and in 2019 (bottom). This intersection used to be the cultural hub of the Bronzeville commercial district and is in focus for community development. Source: Landmarks Division, Chicago DPD, in The Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District, 1994.
One such example is codified by the Quad Communities Quality of Life Plan from 2005 that consists of strategies for Douglas’ economic and social development in coordination with its Bronzeville peers: Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Oakland. The plan’s strategies reflect many axes the globalized beneficiaries manage, but instead of restructuring for the intensification of the services sector, beneficiaries are people, including those marginalized.21 The focus on small business support and development for Bronzeville, low-income housing for Black residents, 21
Quad Communities Development Corporation. (2005). Quad Communities: Connecting Past, Present, and Future, Quality-of-Life Plan, LISC/Chicago’s New Communities Program.
17 expanded educational initiatives for underprivileged schools, and enhanced integration of arts and culture into the quotidian experiences for people creates a new governance of urban form that does not strictly follow globalization’s mandates. What is prevalent, rather, is that the method of neoliberal capitalism that creates globalization is no longer the sole priority of decisionmakers. Douglas’ existence as a sub-area of a global city in this way is also less described in Sassen’s work. Community assets in global cities are contextualized for their providing of services to a technocratic and transnational class.22 With the Quad Communities Plan, though, community assets are intended to be democratized—which is not necessarily a goal of globalization or neoliberalism. As such, Douglas’ relationship to the globalized world is rooted in mitigation, where participation in the global economy is measured and incremental. Its urban form takes on additional meanings of momentum and its spatiality becomes an organic, self-determined condition.
22
Sassen, S. (2001). The impact of new technologies and globalization on cities