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Chicago, Redevelopment Machines, and Local Blues Clubs

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Chicago’s Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs

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Abstract

Chicago, Redevelopment Machines, and Local Blues Cubs initially provide an overview of the key subject matters in the book: the nature of gentrification-centered redevelopment and Chicago’s past and present blues club scene. The chapter then highlights a conceptual need in current urban studies and urban geography: to transcend the now tired story of powerful, brutish neoliberal governances effortlessly producing gentrification-centered redevelopment. Chapter 2 suggests that it is crucial to complicate this common story recognizing that these machine actors now engage (and are engaged by) something different from before: aged, racialized blues clubs and their large base of creative but extremely poor, stigmatized people.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ghetto is used frequently in this book. I realize the pitfalls of using this term—it carries a long history of inflammatory cultural baggage with it. However, there have been recent attempts to recode this term to make it more progressive and timely. Wacquant (2008, 2009), f or example, widely uses the term and enables it to reference the power of racist capitalist structures that permeate low-income communities. It is in the spirit of this seizure and recoding that I use this term.

  2. 2.

    I recognize and identify race as a human construction with a basis in reality only insofar as people are socialized into seeing it in their world (see discussion of conceptual perspective). With this notion in mind, I use such terms as “black South Siders,” “blacks,” and “black Chicagoans” throughout the book.

  3. 3.

    For this study I identify redevelopment governances as allied actors and institutions who share a common city redevelopment vision and seek to make it a reality (Stoker 1999; Jonas and Wilson 1999). All—mayors, city councilors, builders, developers, realtors, planners, city officials, writers—are seen as unified in a redevelopment division of labor, that is, planning it, legitimating it, building it, defending it, rhetorically extolling it. Each actor, producing and operating through values, understandings, and institutional strategies, strives to help the entire group achieve their redevelopment objective as shared interests coordinate, depend on, and synergize with each other.

  4. 4.

    Machine actors are neoliberal in their more thorough acceptance of the principles of private market prowess, de-regulating businesses, shifting government from a politics of redistribution to a politics of growth, and individual causation for personal economic realities.

  5. 5.

    The power of an imagined globalization in global destruction speak has been identified, notably b y Angus Cameron and Ronen Palen (2003). Their analysis presents globalization as an elaborate, crafted knowledge which does immense political work for capital. National government is seen to lead the producing of three imagined globalization economies: offshore, private, and anti-economic. Yet this work insufficiently considers the role of city and local governments in this making.

  6. 6.

    I asked each interviewee a common set of questions: how would you characterize the city’s post-2000 redevelopment? How do you think South Side redevelopment and its new focus on blues clubs have recently proceeded? What institutions and people have been involved in this redeveloping? Who has spearheaded this redevelopment? What do you think their intentions have been? What have the effects been on people, the area, and the club patrons?

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    David Wilson

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Wilson, D. (2018). Chicago, Redevelopment Machines, and Local Blues Clubs. In: Chicago’s Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70818-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70818-8_2

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