Journal of Cultural Geography

ISSN: 0887-3631 (Print) 1940-6320 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjcg20

Chicago goes global: redevelopment, culture, and

fear

David Wilson

To cite this article: David Wilson (2015) Chicago goes global: redevelopment, culture, and fear,
Journal of Cultural Geography, 32:3, 251-269, DOI: 10.1080/08873631.2015.1067391

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2015.1067391

Published online: 16 Oct 2015.

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 Journal of Cultural Geography, 2015
Vol. 32, No. 3, 251–269, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2015.1067391

Chicago goes global: redevelopment, culture, and fear

David Wilson*

Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign,

IL, USA

Chicago’s remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across

Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an
internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding
of Chicago’s recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current
redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles
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two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned
notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate
through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I
chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic
preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted
to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-
global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced
anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of
city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of
culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two
offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things,
as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago’s mainstream and
as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which
renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.
Keywords: Growth machine; Chicago; historic preservation; fear;
neoliberal governance

Introduction
Chicago’s remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust
Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to redevelop the city.
Their goals are now well chronicled: to forge a global Chicago to enhance
city competitiveness and to support one powerful group’s desires and aspira-
tions, real-estate capital (today a prioritized fraction of capital in Chicago)
(Wilson 2007a, 2012a). Once unclear about what economic sector to privilege
as late as the mid-1980s (Koval et al. 2006), this machine today (since 2011 led
by Mayor Rahm Emanuel) brashly builds swaths of gentrified neighborhoods

*David Wilson is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Illi-

nois at Urbana-Champaign, 605 East Springfield Avenue, Computer Applications
Building, Champaign, IL 61801, USA. Email: dwilson2@illinois.edu

© 2015 JCG Press, Oklahoma State University

 252 D. Wilson

(once an isolated enclave north of the Loop) and a sparkling downtown in an

unprecedented support of real-estate interests. Years ago, few could have ima-
gined the intensity of this support as this machine marshals its resources and
public policy to move Chicago into a supposed new era of global relevance
(Betancur 2011).
We now know that a narrative of best redevelopment immediately powers
this deftly using fears (new global times and how it may damage the city,
looming black ghettos), imagined fear-scapes (the new hyper-frenetic globe,
black ghettos), and deepened race-class impugning. These inputs, as now
chronicled, provide the current narrative with resonance, clarity, and deep
appeal. Yet, this usage should not be seen as totally surprising. As Logan
and Molotch (1987) noted long ago, mover and shaker “growth machines”
are always evolving. As times change, these entities must continuously rein-
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vent themselves and their narratives as they toil to control redevelopment.

And this use of fear parallels the reality that we live in fearful times. Fear
has grown in cities of industrialized societies, buoyed by anxiety-producing
9/11 reportage and the widespread deepening of economic uncertainty (Pain
2013). Fear, following Pain, is inscribed in newspaper headers, bodies in
streets, the city’s dark and subterranean corners, and in common thought
(Kern 2010). In Chicago and elsewhere, moral panics about dangerous pro-
cesses, scary people, foreboding neighborhoods, troubled families and illicit
behaviors inform policing strategies, community safety movements, and per-
sonal residential choices (Pain 2013).
This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of Chicago’s recently
changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative
and chronicles two new features about it that I believe have been overlooked
in recent studies: its recently (post 2007) revamped use of fear and its re-
fashioned notion of culture.1 To do this, I flesh out these two elements as
they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program widely used
across Chicago: historic preservation. This program, now re-making 22 neigh-
borhoods across the city (and countless others adjoining them), leads the charge
to forge the new “go-global” Chicago and to replenish the vitality of a powerful
real-estate capital. Historic preservation today significantly valorizes land by
endowing blocks with prestige and promotes the production of gentrified
blocks. In this context, real-estate capital identifies possibilities for areal
upgrade and lucrative investing in these districts (Wilson 2007b). The city’s
powerful symbolic and material public-sector intervention through this
program, it follows, induces tangible social and physical change across
Chicago.
I chronicle three points in this paper. First, Chicago’s historic preservation
initiative, like so many current city programs in Chicago and elsewhere, has
now fully shifted to being a neoliberal development tool to promote the “go
global Chicago” project. With Chicago planners managerialized in neoliberal
times to more thoroughly think and plan for the “real bottom-line”—economic
 Journal of Cultural Geography 253

development—historic preservation has been so mobilized. Second, two domi-

nant fears recently nuanced in form anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroy-
ing globalization and fear of ever-mobile, city-subverting poor African-
Americans. These re-worked fears anchor what I identify as Chicago’s rejuve-
nated “fear economy”. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps
provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture
notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless
glue that unifies Chicago’s mainstream (its traditional usage) and as proble-
matic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic
tainting “ocular trash” (its newest usage). This first notion of culture, like
before, serves up a coveted local gem that needs to be celebrated and protected
for the public good. The second notion of culture, a revisionist offer of “ghetto
culture”, serves something new, a mobile, “body-blighting visuality” that must
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be managed and contained.

This excavation of Chicago’s historic preservation program follows a recent
conceptual trend identified by others. Current programs in urban America, fol-
lowing Lipsitz (1995), achieve dominance via offers of both subterranean
assumptions and psychic appeals that work through two modes of thought
that have settled in these cities: neoliberalism and whiteness. Plundering exist-
ing sensibilities, modern city programs rely upon and are restricted by what is
available to be plundered and worked through. It follows that mainstream poli-
tics and policies, following Smith (2011), have little room to maneuver beyond
the staple of these forces as bases of knowledge are constructed to advance pol-
itical designs. Chicago’s historic preservation program, I suggest, currently
reflects this.
This analysis examines Chicago’s post-2007 growth machine as it operates
across its newest gentrification frontier: the South Side (Figure 1). Working
through an aggressively used “cultural” tool—historic preservation—the aim
is to promote gentrification by engineering three elements: neighborhoods,
local residents, and blues clubs. This choice of what to engineer is not surpris-
ing: numerous South Side neighborhoods (Bronzeville, Pullman) and a swath
of largely downtrodden blues clubs (e.g. Checkerboard on 51st, Lee’s
Unleaded on 74th, Artis’s Lounge on 87th) are still identified in local folklore
as poignantly historic of the Chicago black experience, with purportedly deep
southern Delta roots (Figure 1). “The South Side is steeped in history”, city
planner E. Jones (2011) noted in discussion.

Its communities and [blues] clubs have helped preserve the deep South’s tra-
ditions and ways … the rawness of the Delta—its music, its ways, its values,
have stayed alive and well here … no one knows this better than us …

Using these “opportunity structures”, historic preservation gentrifies the area’s

housing and retail, never losing sight that residents need to be made more com-
pliant and acceptable for gentrification to catch on here.
 254 D. Wilson

The context
Since 2000, Chicago’s redevelopment machine has not so subtly altered their
relationship to the South Side and its blues-scape (Boyd 2008). This area, his-
torically written off for middle- and upper-middle income redeveloping (but
always bound up in this in being used to warehouse the racialized poor),
now becomes cozied up to as a locale to upgrade (Boyd 2008; Hyra 2008). Pre-
viously, the areas’ people, neighborhoods, parks, and blues clubs were ignored
by developers, the media, and public policy. This was ostensibly “a world of its
own … where a way of life … [is] utterly different from that in the American
mainstream” (Lehmann 1986, p. 19). Of course, Chicago’s planning commu-
nity is reluctant to acknowledge any notion of a history of South Side negli-
gence and erasure. As city historian C. Bragg (2010) noted to me,
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it’s true we were not always centrally involved in South Side … but that’s mis-
leading, we did have major initiatives to renew many neighborhoods here, par-
ticularly urban renewal and public housing … All were important … all were
deemed progressive for its time … we always had our eye on the ball here …

But perceptions and desires have changed, as Chicago Planner K. Wilson

(2007b) summed it up to me. “After search and recognition,” he notes,
“we’ve [the planning community] realized that cultural and historical gems
exist here … we have an obligation to bring these out and enrich these commu-
nities … that is our desire … our mission.” Small wonder Chicago’s planning
apparatus has become interested in the South Side: real-estate interests re-dis-
covered the area as a new zone of profitable investment. Blocks of architectu-
rally distinctive housing, relatively good access to the Loop, proximity to the
rapidly gentrifying South Loop, and acres of “rent-gap” land have excited
developers and builders (see Wilson 2012a). One more time, the planning com-
munity has struck out with the interests of one of its historically embraced con-
stituencies—real-estate capital—in mind.
Yet growth machine efforts have moved their recent South Side develop-
ment project along in stages rather than in one bold foray. Initially (the early
2000s), efforts focused on blocks in Bronzeville, the northern-most South
Side neighborhood with easy access to downtown, with attempts to move Chi-
cago’s gentrification frontier beyond the South Loop (Figure 1). Historic pres-
ervation, the major tool used here to promote change, used an aggressive
rhetoric of “an area … seeking to re-claim its heart and soul” (see Reardon
2000). Mayor Daley assisted in a deeply symbolic way: he underscored this
area’s symbolic transformation at this early point, moving into a Near Bronze-
ville condo to buck a decades-old tradition of Daley’s living in blue-collar
Bridgeport (Koval et al. 2006). Following this, transformation overtures dif-
fused outward from Bronzeville and moved especially to blues clubs and
their blocks on the poorer, grittier Deep South, but with a changed tactic.
Faced with hard core disinvestment and neighborhoods further from
 Journal of Cultural Geography 255
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Figure 1. Chicago’s Bronzeville and the South Side.

downtown, emphasis shifted to the use of discourse and the offering of bold
projections of potential beatific change (less actual material intervention)
which still marks the South Side redevelopment project today. Currently,
attempts to re-engineer middle-class imaginings of recreational and residential
possibilities across the South Side aggressively proceed.
Historic preservation, has, from the start, involved an aggressive use of a
custodial ethos leading with a notion of “an area in Chicago that needs to
reclaim its soul”. The Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning
(Historic Preservation Division), in an early application, used this technique to
make a first historic designation: the “Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District” in
 256 D. Wilson

1998 (Moberg 2006). The designed area covered 10 square blocks between
31st and Pershing (39th) which was bolstered two years later with the Motor
Row historic designation nearby. Historic buildings identified—the Overton
Hygienic Building, Chicago Bee Building, Wabash Avenue YMCA, Chicago
Defender Building, Unity Hall, Eighth regiment Armory, Sunset Café,
Victory Monument, and the Supreme Life Building—were trumpeted as
“key historic artifacts that had fallen on hard times and needed a jolt of life
… to bring the South Side back to its once great state … and help the city” (His-
toric Preservation worker D. Elias 2010).
Shortly after, the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership
mapped out a publicized plan to deepen the historicizing (Boyd 2008). This
initiative, “Creating the New Promise”, was to be completed by 2016 (Black
Metropolis National Heritage Area Commission 2011). It involved three com-
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ponents: securing congressional designation as the Black Metropolis National

Area; developing a Center (the Urban Innovation Center) to promote “commu-
nity social enterprise”, and changing the area’s commercial districts. The 2016
benchmark would mark the Great Migration’s 100 year anniversary. This re-
making project, offered as “social and physical altering of an area and its
people” (Planner C. Roberts 2010), connected themes of area history, black
pride, and business entrepreneurship. “Restoring the cultural and economic
heritage of Chicago’s legendary black Metropolis is our shared social
mission,” said Bronzeville Development Head Paul Robinson. Heritage here
could supposedly re-engineer a people and place that ostensibly struggled
with extreme problems.
It must be noted that this drive to transform Bronzeville via historic preser-
vation has not come out of thin air. An earlier impetus to restructuring the area
was provided by the Mid-South Strategic Development Plan: restore Bronze-
ville (Koval et al. 2006). Years earlier, Bronzeville’s redevelopment potential
(proximity to the Loop, low land values, politically vulnerable populations)
had been vaguely recognized by Daley II and the City (see Bennett 2006).
This 1993 plan, authored by a consortium of community organizations and
institutions, called for a concerted effort to “re-discover Bronzeville and
restore the community’s past”. The plan’s centerpiece—to designate a 47th
Street Blues and Jazz District and eight additional historic sites that leaders
like Dorothy Tillman were to later champion and implement—was premised
on a notion of unearthing a past “racial heritage … and using this as an econ-
omic engine to change Bronzeville” (City Planner K. Nichols 2010).
African-American heritage was to be systematically excavated (i.e. the
legacy of its institutions, buildings, parks, monuments). The plan was refined
and re-worked by working groups in 1992 and 2002 (Bennett 2006). As
more institutions became involved in this planning, the Mid-South Strategic
Plan morphed into a new and powerful document: Bronzeville 2010.
A nostalgically delivered history, one more time, was the suggested cure.
The document, suggesting a currently de-moralized and dis-cultured South
 Journal of Cultural Geography 257

Side, extolled an area’s once shining pastness whose unearthing and re-using
could therapeutize a people and place. In theme, a once proud and industrious
black history and social stability, that supposedly vanished, reached its peak
during the early twentieth century. As a disciplining rhetoric, black residents
were said to have once successfully established support institutions that
people around the world envied. In theme, every black person in America
and elsewhere knew of Bronzeville. Its institutions purportedly nurtured
social stability and a creative environment for innovative music (blues, jazz),
entrepreneurial zeal, and scientific invention. In the document, this economic
capital of black America produced amazing entrepreneurs (like Joseph
Jordan, Anthony Overton, and Jesse Binga). Bronzeville economic institutions
had become so powerful and prosperous by 1925, it was stated in the document,
the South State Street business area became known internationally as Ameri-
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ca’s Black Wall Street.

The intricacies of historic preservation

Founded in 1957, historic preservation in Chicago has long been identified as a
mechanism to fulfill one goal: to preserve Chicago’s integrity of buildings,
communities, and places (Wilson 2004). The program—since its inception—
has been served up as a straight-ahead aesthetic improvement initiative. Its
origins lie in the city council establishing the Chicago Commission of Archi-
tectural Landmarks (today it is administered by the Department of Planning
and Development) which was empowered to identify historically significant
buildings across Chicago. In 1968, a subsequent ordinance strengthened the
Commission’s hand by providing them permit-review authority. For the first
time, the Commission could screen rehabilitation and building permits. Still,
landmarks and districts were declared historic on the basis of purely aesthetic
criteria. Economic development, ex-historic preservation worker M. Kay
(2009) noted, was never a consideration in these designations through the
1970s and 1980s.
Today, however, the City now touts historic preservation as a tool to
promote economic development, and uses it on the South Side, especially in
the Bronzeville area, to promote gentrification (Wilson 2004). Yet the
program is not overtly presented as a pro-gentrification tool. Programmatic
rhetoric, on the one hand, speaks of upgrading qualities of life for existing resi-
dents. South Siders are enticed to support the program given it promises to
deliver economic upgrade and new positive meanings to the South Side. In
the face of a relentless disinvestment and neglect, this offer intrigues many
locals. On the other hand, another programmatic offer is made to appeal to
real-estate interests and the general public: supposedly it will deliver new
pockets of themed, black upgrade space to deepen the go-global city project,
provide new opportunities for real-estate interests, and tame a supposedly
grim, different people. These three communicated themes coalesce into one
 258 D. Wilson

broad-based appeal to these two constituencies. Bronzeville, through this

second offer, is to become one more city element to enhance Chicago’s
“symphony of diversity” and rise as a new lucrative space for real-estate
investors.
In this first appeal, a sketchy rhetoric leads the charge: to promote “areal
and population recovery”, “black promise”, and “possibility to capture once
proud black traditions” (Planner V. Ess 2009). Through this, the City suggests
the need to fix up and preserve South Side homes, stabilize neighborhoods, and
conserve the physical integrity of blocks and structures. The South Side, in this
oratory, is to be upgraded with one constituent in mind: existing residents.
Recovery and renewal of “a people”, “a culture”, “a place”, and “a history
with rich traditions” are the purported keys. This is the stuff of suggested
areal turnaround for present residents, community remembrance, and hope
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for renewal whose appeal is clearly to South Side locals. As South Side resi-
dents and institutions search for any possibility to stem decay and neglect,
the population targeted for seduction is obvious. Local planner S. Plann
(2009) identified this effort to me as “an attempt to capture the center of an
area’s heart, to renew its past … to enhance the fabric of community life for
present South Siders”.
But more deeply, re-worked fears and a new notion of culture are invoked
in this narrative to provide historic preservation with another mission: to gen-
trify and revalorize land, and tame and domesticate this population and area.
Worth repeating: Forging a global Chicago to enhance city competitiveness
and the drive to support real-estate capital’s desires and aspirations (today a pri-
vileged fraction of capital in Chicago) are the crucial motivators for this second
level of discourse (Wilson 2007b, 2012a). Historic preservation, in this regard,
supports real-estate interests and the darkest desires of a ghetto-wary public. In
moving forward, pervasive worries of the mainstream are mined, clarified, and
worked through in incorporated images. This is the underbelly of the historic
preservation program, the side that makes its appeals to deep-seated anxieties
about place, culture, city livability, and city future. More than playing to fear
is at work here: there is demagoguery. The discussion that follows elaborates
on this new demagogic reality.

Global fear-speak and its use of the culture concept

The first used fear speak, working through a distinctive notion of culture, puts
into play the notion of a now looming city punishing globalization that renders
historic preservation an essential city economic tool. The narrative speaks of
something powerful and frightening: a lurking space (“the globe”) out there
which threatens a core city gem: mainstream city culture. In the narrative,
“we [Chicago] face new global days that necessitate that all rally to make
Chicago a more competitive and desirable city to live in and work in … ” (His-
toric Planner B. Smith 2013). “Chicago,” to Smith, “faces a new reality,
 Journal of Cultural Geography 259

whether we like it or not … it is a reality of new competition, of other cities,

states, and countries emboldened to steal our jobs, rob tax base, swipe our
goodies … at a moment’s notice.” “For this reason,” to Smith (2013), “pro-
grams like historic preservation currently have a mission … to enhance
Chicago culturally, physically, aesthetically … make our city one of the
desired hotspots across the globe today … ”
Smith and other historic preservationists serve up a sense of a new sober
realism: Chicago must mobilize its state apparatus and private sector to re-
entrepreneurialize the city. At this rhetoric’s core, a supposed new hyper-com-
petitive reality makes Chicago easily discardable as a place of investment, pro-
duction, and business. This once enclosed and confident container of the
economic, in the rhetoric, has recently become a porous and leaky landscape
rife with a potential for a dramatic economic hemorrhaging. Against this sup-
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posed reality, Chicago needs to be seen as beset by a kind of accumulation dis-

order and economic uncertainty that now haunts it. Chicago, as a place of
becoming, is a threatened but historically resilient locale that once again
must act ingeniously to survive. The offered signs of this ominous potential-
ity—municipal fiscal depletion, an aging physical infrastructure, the “reality”
of decayed residential, commercial, and production spaces that dot the city—
become deployed as disciplining signifiers of what the future of Chicago
could be.
But this is not simple global-speak that dominated early renditions of
globalization in policy narratives across urban America (Singh 2003). In
recent years, the offer of globalization’s very nature has been expediently
changed. Now, this Chicago machine offers something more frightening: a
furtive globalization. It is one of sporadic penetrations, uneven city
effects, and sporadic bursts. It vaguely looms, periodically attacks, and is
unpredictable. Offers of an engulfing global totality, once so dominant,
become something else: a moving, unpredictable attacker of districts and
areas. In this vein, Chicago now “faces a rapidly firing … not clearly advan-
cing globalization” (Chicago Planner B. Wilson 2009). “Now, globalization
is out there in the world, not always visible, but stretching its muscles that
can truly hurt our city [Chicago]” (Chicago Planner E. Jones 2011). With
this new notion of globalization, a once calculable and brute globalization
becomes something far scarier: a murky, difficult-to-discern-and-predict glo-
balization. Sense of a central hovering enemy of the city, this way, is given a
new haunting gloss.
The first dominant use of the culture concept deftly supports this offer of
global intruder. It is an ideal, agreed upon set of civic norms and meanings
that effectively tie a city’s people together. It is the stuff of togetherness,
human bonding, and a serene human order that has supposedly kept Chicago
socially intact and socially stable for many decades. At its center, via both
direct articulation and inference, are two concepts, the family and community.
The family is often invoked in historic preservation narrative as “the anchor of
 260 D. Wilson

community … and Chicago’s rich history … as the timeless building block of

what all so deeply cherish … ” (Preservation Planner B. Smith 2013). Here,
in appeal, is the cherished milieu of lived experiences that has anchored a har-
monious Chicago for decades. Similarly, community is communicated as “the
true lived place of Chicago … we are a city of neighborhoods and communities
… that have provided us with traditions, morals, and the psychic glue to be a
proud and resourceful city” (Preservation Planner B Wilson 2009). Here is
the supposed true Chicago, its pride and essence on the ground which has nur-
tured millions of Chicagoans.
The power of this notion of culture? It is put into play as something
experienced, structuring, and guiding. Culture purportedly creates and
builds social and physical worlds. At the same time, culture is enriching
and is coveted. Masking any sense of oppression and inequality, there is
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only the pleasure of the familiar, the time-tested, the known, and the indivi-
dually nurturing. Culture, this way, is reduced to the romanticized milieu of
intimate family connections, emotional security, the nurturance of children,
the building of strong and sturdy communities. Grounded are the invocations
of love, safety, security, and shared beneficial experiences, and dismissed are
any semblance of alienation, violence, and despair. But in this communicat-
ing, all is not well with this prized culture: a feint menace (globalization) is
out there—somewhere and hovering—as a dimly recognizable process that
stands to destroy it.
This culture-laced fear is communicated in a distinctive way: via offers of
short, meaning-packed statements placed within declarations of historic preser-
vation’s goals and aspirations: “the new times”, “Chicago’s current days”,
“changed city realities”, “Chicago’s grounded culture”, and “the city’s estab-
lished cultural traditions” (Mayor Daley used all of these notions in presenta-
tions before the Mayors Forum in Chicago in 2005 and 2006). At the core of
this communicating, these utterances decisively reference, via relay, estab-
lished senses of global subjects, global processes, and a treasured local
culture (global entrepreneurs, global flows of capital, vulnerable and fiscally
struggling cities, and a timeless local culture; Wilson 2007b). These statements,
tapping common understandings in the public consciousness, thus unleash
actors, processes, and realities widely understood to be real-world things in
current Chicago (see Fairclough (1992) on the prevalence of this communica-
tive process in discourse). In this way, a decisive global–local frame and sup-
posedly unmistakable cultural realisms are made to move seamlessly through
these narratives.
Note, for example, Chicago Planner V. Ess’s (2009) comments about his-
toric preservation and the realities of new global times on the South Side. Dis-
cussing the 47th Street Blues and Jazz District, he notes:

… this historic preservation on the South Side is needed because it can stabilize
the economy and culture of Bronzeville and the entire city … culture and
 Journal of Cultural Geography 261

economy are [Chicago’s] gems … in a now harsh Chicago as we face globaliza-

tion, we cannot and should not lose these things.

The reach here into global sensibilities, and what it most meaningfully threa-
tens, is decisive and obvious. Same thing with Chicago Planner L. Eldon
(2009) as he comments about the same historic preservation project on the
South Side: “a city and its communities now face an uncertain world that
requires an immediate policy response to keep a culturally and socially
vibrant city healthy and competitive … ” To Eldon,

the Blues and Jazz District, fully nurtured and developed, will provide us the
culture, the history, the glue to stabilize this community and the city … and
keep Chicago a world class city that it has worked so hard to attain …
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Eldon’s oratory communicates not just through direct assertions, but also
through inferences that explode out of sentences. A powerful resource is ulti-
mately activated: everyday understandings. Globalization here and what it
can purportedly pulverize does not need to be directly referenced, it is put
before the public by inference and insinuation.
Made to carry these meanings, South Side historic preservation becomes
imaginatively placed in a realm desired by the growth machine: city economic
development aide (Planner B. Wilson 2007a). Now, historic preservation on the
South Side becomes, first and foremost, a beneficial city-wide economic devel-
opment tool that tussles with a powerful globalization. It is to be seen, at its
core, as an attempt to economically rejuvenate the entirety of Chicago.
Central to this, the public is taken to a kind of temporal reality, “emergency
time”, to understand this programmatic usage. The public becomes nudged
to see a timely program—historic preservation—coming into the South Side
at the right time: to help Chicago respond to a destructive, hovering globaliza-
tion. Thus, planner V. Ess (2009), extolling the virtues of the “Creating the New
Promise” historic initiative, noted “historic preservation’s surprisingly impor-
tant economic role—in the tenor of the times—that allows us to fight the
current economic and cultural circumstances that the city now finds itself in
… ” This way, South Side historic preservation becomes located at the inter-
stices of benevolent mission, economic progressive instrument, and protector
of timeless cultural ways.
The public, it follows, is to recognize Chicago’s new plight and mobilize
around the program’s purported economic progressivity. The public is to
view an area—the South Side—but to imagine most importantly its place in
the broader setting of the city. Bronzeville and its nearby neighborhoods, it
follows, are to be re-scaled in the common imaginary to understand a best rede-
velopment for this area. Thus, to planner C. Roberts (2010), in discussing the
Black Metropolis Bronzeville District, this means “keeping the program real
… letting it help renew city culture, city competitiveness, and Chicago’s
 262 D. Wilson

economic zeal … ” The narrative’s framing of the city, so important here, is of a

troubled and challenged city and its established culture, an ominous periphery
(new ominous global times), and the worrying reality of frenetic business
people and capital. The functionality that goes hand in hand with this use of
fear is obvious. Historic preservation is, ultimately, to be comprehended as a
keenly functional economic tool that can deliver what the city ostensibly so
desperately needs, gentrification.

Ghetto fear-speak and its use of the culture concept

Historic preservation-speak on the South Side currently works through another
revised fear and revised notion of culture: a visually contaminating, mobile
“ghetto” people who need isolating or re-making for the city’s good. A long
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established local fear is provided a deeper resonance. Previous to this (for at

least five decades), the supposed dilemma was the ominous “black ghetto”.
A subculture of poverty, supposedly seared into the social fabric of these ter-
rains, was the city villain (see Sowell 1984; Williams 1988). The litany of
things ascribed to these spaces—youth-entrapping street corners, defective
and deficient public schools, dangerous parks, the mean and brutal streets—
frightened Chicagoans (Wilson 2007b). Of course, fear of race in Chicago
has a long history; it has not merely denoted physical categories, it has orga-
nized elaborate perceptions and ideas about supposed natural differences
across racial categories (Hirsch 2005).
But now, this supposed dilemma has been opened up to include something
else: visually blighting black bodies (particularly youth bodies) as the ghetto’s
free-flowing tentacles. The mobile black body now freely moves across
Chicago capable of degrading civic space as Chicago supposedly struggles
to spatially re-make itself for its very survival. The offer is of a new problematic
cultural object in a supposed time (new global days) when Chicago must fer-
vently control what it communicates to the world. At the core of this is
“ghetto culture”, served up as an ocular-resonant bodily product, something
internalized in human form and human mind, transportable and contagious.
This free-wheeling body, in the cultural casting, is the new vile cultural
object unleashed upon the city. The supposed importance of this cultural
entity? It, as a volatile visuality, produces something new, raw appearances,
that purportedly destroys coveted (renewing and gentrified) neighborhoods,
chases away potential city-benefiting investment, and downgrades socially
improving downtowns.
Incorporating this theme, historic preservation is dimly presented as a tool
(after 2000) that can strengthen the managing and re-engineering of “a people”.
Through this program, South Side locals are to be tamed and managed to
support what the growth machine most wants in the area: gentrification.
Outside of blocks where public housing dominates, South Siders here are not
treated as easily removable people, but as entrenched poverty persons that
 Journal of Cultural Geography 263

need to be re-civilized for gentrification to gain a foothold. Thus, historic pres-

ervation oratory, post 2000, furtively communicates a program whose impo-
sition of a physical and cultural order can domesticate a mobile, troubling
population. For example, Preservation Planner A. Malik (2009) noted to me
in discussion:

we all know poor blacks on the South Side are troubled and hurting … buildings
need to be restored, but also new social and cultural ways are needed … a new
dose of social renewal will help South Siders … which historic preservation,
especially the 47th Street Blues and Jazz District, can deliver …

Similarly, city planner L. Eldon (2009) termed historic preservation on the

South Side, particularly the “Creating the New Promise” initiative, “a heavy
dose of what the area really needs—stability, restoration, healing, and a re-
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making of social ways … it’s all good, it’s about helping and stabilizing … ”
Through offers of this second fear and the second usage of this culture
concept, Chicago’s mainstream becomes pushed to recognize historic preser-
vation as something important to them in a key way: as an ally to contain
anxiety about the black poor. The growth machine, in insinuation, sides with
the public and is on the policy frontlines to ensure that a deep fear will not
be realized. No need exists to rouse the citizenry, it is communicated, historic
preservation will do its business never forgetting “the public’s” real interests
that may be incapable of overt annunciation. Subterranean comprehensions
that lurk in the shadows—racial realisms, class truths, spatial verities— are
the worked-through sensibilities. These shadowy comprehensions, understood
as the stuff of Chicago’s “core realities” (Davis 1990), become excavated in an
obscured communicating. This way, a kind of class-race emotive bond is forged
between the public and this machine which consolidates the drive to use this
program to continue a decades-old directive of containing poor-blacks. In com-
munication, “truth” here gets a hearing, even if it cannot be verbalized.
Historic preservation’s foray into upgrading the area’s blues clubs and their
blocks is at the core of this second growth machine drive. Gentrification, in
their eyes, could be spearheaded around these blocks by taming and stabilizing
these clubs. Here, the use of fear that propels the mission to restructure the
South Side gives way—in overt annunciation—to the strategic use of nostalgia.
In this process, these clubs are widely served up as a strategic object: as auth-
entic, raw black spaces that could supposedly be a social model for these com-
munities. These clubs, in elaborate and glossy communication, are said to be
wondrous sites for benevolent, respectful and civic people, and continue to
house individuals (musicians, patrons, club owners) who boldly speak and
perform their time-tested cultural truths. Mixing nostalgia and stereotype,
clubs like the Checkerboard, Lee’s Unleaded, and Club 7313 are narrated to
supposedly contain “ … real authenticity and black traditions rooted in the
Deep South … down-home charm … meals … cooking in the back … women
 264 D. Wilson

club owners [who] know everyone”, women … affectionately referred to as

“Auntie”, “food always cook[s] outside”, and “great music … ” (see Chicago
Tribune 2008, 2010). “South Side blues clubs,” in offer, “are about as authentic
as it gets … continue to be stages for the expression of engaged, brilliant blues
players and South Side black life … that is the stuff that truly deserves historic
preservation” (Chicago Planner C. Ever 2010).
This club portrayal is expedient and strategic. It, beneath the apparent sim-
plicity and innocuousness, speaks to something that the machine wishes to
communicate: what locals should be and covet. Here is Bruce Lincoln’s
(1989) tyranny of imagined micro-spaces (the blues clubs) whose assembled
codes stage idealized neighborhood values for all to realize, embrace, and
work for. These renditions of blues clubs stake out a South Side supposedly
in need of what these clubs, past and present, are asserted to contain: harmo-
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nious class and race relations, hard-working laborers, safe and sane recreational
pursuits, compliant black ways, and opportunities for middle-class patronage.
The current South Side, it is insinuated, thus suffers from a lack of key
things, stalwart values, morals, and ethics, and needs to be socially re-engin-
eered using these clubs as social models. Residents would presumably
become stable (and would be made less threatening) if their community and
ways were changed following this model. Historic preservation, it is suggested,
could aid this by cultivating the social milieu of these clubs and spreading their
social essence across the South Side. This tool, then,

could socially and ethically lead the way to make a new South Side … . There is a
real history and respect for others here … these clubs are the paradigm for what
could be … and really … what needs to be. (Historic Preservation Official
E. Elias 2010)

This rendition of blues clubs ultimately functions as a “micro-metaphor”

for community ideals that is a morality tale of stark proportions. To agree
with this rendition’s character of these clubs is to boldly assert that the South
Side needs to progressively move forward. These renditions of clubs, it
follows, trumpet the supposed truths and falsities about South Side needs
and its best course of redevelopment, i.e. the growth goals and strategies that
need to be supported and pursued. Casting the area’s blues clubs this way, it
follows, both proofs and purges visions of best redevelopment for the area.
A calculated portrayal of one small community object, community blues
clubs, operates to discursively manage South Side redevelopment. The govern-
ance’s struggle to control comprehension in this sphere, it follows, is complex
and fervent. These clubs, made centers of a people’s tamed and exotic ways,
ultimately become symbolic pieces mobilized in the machine’s drive to restruc-
ture the area in a particular way. A central logic for this South Side restructuring
thus peeks out of these club pronouncements. No formal plan or map speaks as
decisively.
 Journal of Cultural Geography 265

Historic preservation’s use of the area’s “blues tradition” to communicate

the South Side’s idealized social fabric has not stopped and has recently
been extended to the edges of the Bronzeville historic district. In 2006, historic
preservation was used to help “bluisify” the disinvested 47th Street area (Hyra
2008). City and media oratory presented a once great blues and jazz terrain now
supposedly forgotten under decades of disinvestment and ruin. With city and
local politician support, historic district designation quickly converted this
six-block area to the 47th Street Blues and Jazz District. This area, pre-
World War II, was claimed to house at least 11 thriving music clubs that culti-
vated a bevy of national artists, e.g. Sam Cooke, Louis Armstrong, Howlin
Wolf, Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, and Willie Dixon. Supplementing this, the
City also used its building landmarks program to designate four buildings
along 47th Street as “blues-historic” (City Planner K. Nichols 2010). Finally,
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the city placed four historic markers on or near 47th Street to further certify
the area. The most touted marker, “The Blues Trail: Mississippi to Chicago”,
celebrates the South Side in-movement of a central blues icon—black Missis-
sippians—during World War II. The City trumpeted these designations, speak-
ing of the “need to feature a forgotten black history of music … that needed to
feature blues pioneers who lived and worked here” (City Planner K. Nichols
2010).
Beyond Bronzeville on the South Side, applying historic preservation to
entire neighborhoods post 2000 has been non-existent. But this is deceptive:
an increasing number of buildings south of 54th Street (the southern boundary
of Bronzeville and Hyde Park) after 2000 have received historic designation
(homes, churches, synagogues, parks). Between 2003 and 2010, the City desig-
nated more than 25 buildings or micro-spaces south of 54th as historic land-
marks (Historic Preservation Planner D. Elias 2010). This designation further
speaks to the governance’s new interest in redeveloping portions of the
South Side. Such city designating, in Planner B. Wilson’s (2009) words, rep-
resents “the seed bed of areal turnaround … that can coax new investment in
the area”. Ten years earlier, historic preservation of any kind south of 54th
was widely believed to be unthinkable. To Woodlawn activist Elise Richter
(2009), “historic preservation here before 2000 was unheard of … not a possi-
bility … this area was just not on the city radar … but that has changed and will
change more as South Side real-estate heats up”.

The new concepts of fear and culture

Chicago’s revamped growth machine has recently altered its offers of fear and
culture as it narrates historic preservation and its need to be applied along the
city’s new gentrification frontier, the South Side. Providing these two (fear and
culture) ground this text of best redevelopment in meaning, values, and sensi-
bilities. They anchor the current drive to dominate what this amalgam has
always sought to colonize: the public’s field of imagining. These fears and
 266 D. Wilson

versions of culture, so important in this political project, serve up villains,

ominous forces, and enemies that draw people into worlds of simple caricature,
stereotype, and race-class “truths” to understand this redevelopment vision.
The offering is elaborate: in this served-up discursive world, self-fulfilling
signs are everywhere which function as a series of proofs. A manufactured
world, keyed to an ever-changing growth machine’s dreams and aspirations,
reflects their tools, strategies, and politics. In this world, no single shred of evi-
dence is made to exist that contradicts the offered “reality”.
That this growth machine has recently changed should not surprise us, but
the specific nature of this change should. On the one hand, this machine has not
unexpectedly altered its ways—its patterns of intervention and content of nar-
rative—to navigate changing economic and political circumstances. It, as
before, must continue to carefully read changing economic and political cir-
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cumstances and respond in adroit ways (Smith 2011). But, on the other
hand, it could scarcely be predicted that Chicago’s machine, first, would
more strenuously seize global sensibilities as a powerful fear-speak and re-
work its content the way it has done. Globalization and fear here, more than
in the past, have become inextricably bound. And second, who could decipher
that this machine would restructure fear of “the colored” by fixating on some-
thing different from the age-old, symbolically ravaged “black ghetto”: visually
blighting black bodies. “Black ghettos”, now, become a symbolic backdrop
against which we are to know the dangers of its fully unleashed germ of
destruction: roaming, ocular-toxic black bodies.
Offers of culture help illuminate “the global trope” and “the black-body
trope”. The global trope projects culture’s first version—the civic norms and
meanings that bond a serene mainstream—to serve up a potentially haunting
loss from an afflicting globalization. Culture here, a civic resource needing cul-
tivation and protection, may wither by a destructive globalization which city
redevelopment must confront. A theater of impending loss stages a harrowing
municipal possibility. The visual-body trope relies on a different offer of culture
—the ocular repugnant “ghettoality” crystallized in black bodies—to forward
the second lurking enemy within current Chicago. Culture here, a body to be
contained or re-engineered, perplexes because it is produced, reproduced,
experienced, and structuring. Much to the difficulties of civic Chicago, this
culture is resilient and mobile. Chicago now, it is communicated, must be re-
visualized into respectability (i.e. be globally competitive) as the day’s new pol-
itical imperative.
At the heart of my interpretation, then, this program, like so many others in
current Rust Belt America, is a deceptively complex offer. Following Lipsitz
(1995), it secures its dominance via a mix of hidden assumptions and
emotive appeals that nestle in two central “analytic guideposts”: neoliberalism
and whiteness. As Lipsitz (1995) notes, such programs work through fears,
haunts, and accepted stocks of understandings. As Smith (2011) puts it,
those that make programs and policy here are today momentarily trapped in
 Journal of Cultural Geography 267

a time-space convergence of neoliberalism and whiteness which flows through

social fabrics. Mainstream politics and policies, to Smith, fail to maneuver
beyond these forces as bases of knowledge are constructed to advance political
designs. Chicago’s historic preservation program, I suggest, currently reflects
this.
Chicago, in theme, now seemingly has but one option along this gentrifica-
tion frontier: to mobilize government and its historic preservation program.
This tool, in elaborate communication, can strengthen the go-global city re-
making, contain the damage afflicted by the black ghetto toxin, and re-engineer
the black poor to accept the gentrification now at their doorstep. The growth
machine, this way, casts itself as the potential salvationist of a needy
Chicago. Here, in symbol, is the progressive public–private amalgam that
can help the city navigate turbulent political and economic times. All should
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support this drive to “revitalize” the South Side, it is communicated, amid

the play being to deep-seated fears. City “growth”, one more time, spectaca-
lizes and costumes a profoundly classed and racialized redevelopment as pur-
ported custodians of the public good.
As a final point, and I believe a refreshing one, we must recognize that
fervent and effective opposition is possible and may now be on the horizon.
For the tyrannizing power of this political formation is never complete, it
always has to be made and re-made. Chicago’s growth machine, as it operates
across the South Side, appears at first glance as a blunt neoliberal operative.
They flagrantly offer a kind of new shock treatment (e.g. the need to commer-
cialize blues and nearby blocks, the necessity of taming and domesticating local
residents) that all are to realize and rally around. But things are anything but
simple. This machine today is daily negotiated by many South Side insti-
tutions—community development corporations, block groups, tenant coun-
cils—that have the capacity to disrupt the machine’s rhetoric and actions.
None at the moment have done so, but the machine’s actions have increasingly
been questioned. The machine, in this sense, must continuously struggle to
negotiate shifting political ground, engage new possibilities and constraints,
and grapple with new forms of contestation. Only with success on these
fronts can the myth of its naturalness and inevitability be hardened. At the
moment, discord is beginning to crystallize on the South Side whose mush-
rooming is a distinct possibility (Wilson 2012a). We all will soon learn the
degree to which this emerging groundswell will change South Side redevelop-
ment. Stay tuned.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Chris Post, Alyson Greiner, and the Cultural Geography Specialty Group of
the Association of American Geographers for the invite to deliver this talk at the Associ-
ation of American Geographers Meeting in Chicago. The paper benefited enormously
from draft comments from John Betancur, Melissa Heil, Brian Jefferson, Priyam Tripa-
thy, and Matt Wilson.
 268 D. Wilson

Note
1. The notion culture has been defined in many ways. For this paper, I borrow from
Raymond Williams (1981, p. 41) who defines culture as “the signifying system
through which … a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and
explored”. Here, culture is the world of competing representational mélanges and
the practices they produce that is ultimately constitutive of social processes rather
than merely reflecting or representing them.

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