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Territorial stigmatization, silencing and urban growth discourse on Chicago’s South Side

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Department of Geography & GIS
Location
Room 2049 Natural History Building
Date
Apr 7, 2022   3:00 - 4:00 pm  
Speaker
Dr. Tilman Schwarze, University of Glasgow
Cost
This event is free and open to public
Registration
Registration
Contact
Geography & GIS
E-Mail
geography@illinois.edu
Views
35
Originating Calendar
Geography and Geographic Information Science

Although Chicago’s South Side is often represented in public imaginaries as a “vortex and vector of social disintegration”, following Wacquant’s seminal work on advanced marginality and territorial stigma (Wacquant et al., 2014, p. 1274), contemporary spatial representations of this part of the city are more complicated than that. Despite a prolonged territorial stigmatization and defamation of communities and neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side as violent “no-go” areas and “gang-infested”, those negative representations are currently also enmeshed with wider urban growth narratives and rhetoric that promulgate a new era of economic prosperity and development. This presentation seeks to unravel the relationship between territorial stigmatization and urban growth discourses. In doing so, the focus will be on the planned Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago’s Southeast Side and how it is envisioned as the new locus of economic growth and revitalization and as an opportunity to overcome past experiences of economic neglect, disinvestment, and racial and territorial stigma. It is argued that a growth coalition consisting of the Obama Foundation, the city mayor, private developers and community groups strategically mobilize the history of territorial and racial stigma to discursively frame and promote the OPC as a new ‘space of hope’ for Chicago’s Southeast Side. Yet, at the same time, the OPC growth machine silences critical voices of its redevelopment efforts in adroit ways. Silencing, it is argued here, does not mean censorship. Rather, it involves attempts by growth machines to relativize the importance of critical and dissent voices in redevelopment projects.

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