The Last Project Standing: Building an Ethics for a City Without Public Housing

Author: Catherine Fennell

Dissertation School: University of Chicago

Pages: 310

Publication Date: August 2009

Availability:
Available from the HUD USER Helpdesk P.O. Box 23268 Washington, DC 20026-3268 Toll Free: 1-800-245-2691 Fax: 1-202-708-9981 Email: oup@oup.org

Access Number: 10851

Descriptors:
U.S., urban citizenship, built environment, welfare transformation

Abstract:

In the mid 1990s, Chicago embarked on the most ambitious urban planning experiment of its kind: The demolition of troubled Chicago Housing Authority (public housing) projects, and their transformation into smaller-scaled, mixed-income, private neighborhood developments called "new communities." Launched as a model for national public housing reform, Chicago’s controversial experiment has more recently drawn criticism for its considerable residential displacements and shortsighted expectations about the salutary effects of mixed-income neighborhood life.

This dissertation approaches Chicago’s experiment as one that conjoins the palpability of past and impending state failures to provide for citizens’ well being with the potentials of new, "post welfare" forms of social belonging in urban America. Attention to the affective and sensory qualities of everyday life within a changing built environment shows two things. First, relations of social care "built within" the urban environments of the United States' Fordist-Keynesian welfare state continue to structure everyday life and political possibility, despite dramatic changes in those environments.

Secondly, a spatially oriented welfare reform experiment affects those beyond its immediately targeted demographic – here, public housing residents. I show that it does so by cultivating an ethical urban citizenry whose members feel compelled to practice care, commemoration, and concern through their intimate attachments and commitments to a place, and the people "in" it. An ethnographic and archival study of the transformation of the West Side Henry Horner complex into the "new community" of "Westhaven" thus frames Chicago’s public housing reforms as an experiment in the ethics of everyday urban living.

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