8 John P. Koval
about by the transformation of the occupational system itself, rather than through individual advancement within a fixed occupational wage hierarchy …. A man got on the escalator simply by taking and holding a job, and then simply watched his income rise steadily as the nation’s entire occupational wage structure shifted upward. (Massey and Hirst 1998, 56)
As it turns out, the 1950s and 1960s were the last hurrah for America’s industrial hegemony. The United States was evolving a postindus trial, high-technology, knowledge-based service economy, and the transition would be stressful and telling.
The 1970s and 1980s were not kind to much of Chicago’s labor force. It is now reasonably clear that, during those two decades, the winds of change were beginning to blow, bringing in a new economic era. First came deindustrializa tion in the Rust Belt cities of the Midwest. The human cost was high. Chicago lost 32% of all manufacturing jobs between 1969 and 1983- dropping from a high of nearly one million to less than 600,000 (See Chapters 2 and 3). The decimation of Chicago’s broad-shouldered, blue-collar labor force was beginning. Then, on its heels, came a restructuring of the business sector that was similarly devastating for white-collar workers. Massey and Hirst put it simply: “The period 1969-1989 brought a stagnation of structural mobility . . . and a growing polarization of the occupational wage structure” (Massey and Hirst 1998, 56). The net result was a series of proactive and reactive efforts by many players with differing interests, differing definitions of the situation, and differ ing goals. Government at all levels, major and minor businesses and industries, labor unions, investment bankers, and venture capitalists all weighed in. Analysts cleaned up that very messy process by using the simple label of “economic restructuring.”
Over the last three decades, the economic restructuring of Chicago has included several components. Three merit special attention: the transformation of metropolitan Chicago’s in dustrial base, the transformation of metropoli tan Chicago’s labor force, and the geographic restructuring of industry and labor.
Economic Transformations: Industry, Labor, Geography. The major blow to Chicago’s tradi tional economy was a one-two punch delivered during the 1970s and 1980s. First came the rise of service jobs and the service economy; second, a near-simultaneous decline in manu facturing jobs and the manufacturing economy. During the mid 1950s, manufacturing jobs in Chicago outnumbered service jobs by a 3.2-to-l ratio. In 2001, service jobs outnum bered manufacturing jobs by a 2.2-to-l ratio, with 1982 being the crossover year for the numeric dominance of service economy jobs (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2001).
The stress of economic restructuring and the rise of globalization caused management to: rethink how to optimize labor utilization and restructure the existing labor force. Such thinking took two forms. One form was the acceleration of a long-term trend: Enterprises became more capital intensive and less labor intensive, replacing workers with technology. (The phrase “capital-intensive industries,” like “job furloughs;’ is a spin-doctor expression that masks some hard realities for workers. One East Chicago steel mill reduced its labor force by eighteen thousand jobs-one-fifth of its peak labor force-and still produced four times the amount of steel in 1998 as in 1985, thanks to an infusion of high technology via capital in vestments. The slashing of the labor force was, perhaps, not too little, but most certainly too late. That same steel mill filed for Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code in December of 2000-an oft-repeated event in the industrial Midwest.)
A second type of labor force restructur ing aimed at the greater optimization of labor through a radically new creation: the contingent labor force. This innovation reduces the labor force to a few “core” jobs and, as need dictates, brings in a “just-in-time” contingent labor force from the periphery. The work force mobilized by temporary help agencies doubled in size be tween 1982 and 1989 and doubled again between 1989 and 1997 (Gonas 1998; Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt 1999). One temp agency executive refers to his and other agencies as the ATM ‘s of the job market (Castro 1997, 44). In Illinois, a state whose statistics are dominated by Chicago,
at the peak of the economic cycle in 1998, as many as one-half of all vacancies in manufac turing were filled by temporary workers. Temp agencies and the contingent labor forces they supply exist at both ends of the occupational spectrum-the trained and skilled as well as unskilled employees. Mitchell Fromstein, former president of Manpower Inc. , recently proclaimed that the United States is going from just-in-time manufacturing to just-in-time employment (Peck and Theodore 2001, 476).
As business and industry in Chicago was be ing transformed, so too was its geography. The death of some industries and the massive decline of others, not only left sectoral holes in Chicago’s economy but also physical holes, such as the 100+ still-vacant acres in Chicago’s South Side left by the demise of Wisconsin Steel. Similar holes in the economic and physical landscape ex ist as a result of the exporting of some businesses and industries “offshore” to other countries.
This geographic restructuring also is seen in the movement of existing businesses and indus tries to Chicago’s six collar counties, especially Cook and DuPage, accompanied by the rise of new business and industry in those and other collar counties. Since 1960, the physical location of major portions of the Chicago Metropolitan Area’s economy has tilted significantly toward suburbia. Chicago experienced a greater than 50% decline in the number of manufacturing es tablishments within the city limits between 1960 and 2001, while, in contrast, the collar counties roughly doubled their numbers over that same period.
The geographic restructuring of the economy also produced a geographic restructuring of the labor force; as business and industry moved to suburbia, so too did their labor forces. Nearly 80% of metropolitan Chicago’s labor force lived in the city in 1955; less than a third did so by 2000. During this 45-year span, the geography of where workers work versus where they live has undergone a near 100% change; in 1955, the Chicago-to-collar country worker residence ratio was approximately an 80-20 split, with the city of Chicago being the residential heavy weight. By 2000, the ratios had reversed; the col lar counties now dominate in a (roughly) 70-30 split, highlighting yet another indicator of a sub-
An Overview and Point of View 9
stantial but gradual geographic change occur ring over the decades and adding up to a radical reversal of situations when we compare 1955 to 2002.
The Shape of the Present. Two additional impor tant factors, race and ethnicity and industrial and occupational niches are not so obviously linked to economic restructuring. Economic restructuring, combined with immigration and superimposed over existing racial and eth nic occupational conditions, includes the phe nomenon of racially and ethnically linked industrial and occupational niches. In this case, a niche refers to an industry or occupation with disproportionately high numbers of one racial or ethnic group-to the extent that the occu pation of that industry becomes “theirs.” Con struction workers in Chicago know full well that, for example, “drywall work is Mexican work.” In the dry cleaning industry, approximately two-thirds of Chicago’s over 3,000 establish ments are owned by Koreans (Holli 1995, 491), and “somewhere between 84% and 86%” of all Dunkin’ Donut franchises in the metropoli tan area are owned by Indians or Pakistanis (Dunkin’ Donuts 1998). These illustrations are the tip of a substantial iceberg and reflect the racial and ethnic dimension of economic and labor force restructuring.
As in any transition, a passing of the old oc curs and the emergence of the new. Yet, the old does not fall off the flat edge of the Earth, but typ ically coexists along with the new, sometimes for long periods. A case can be made that Chicago has two different yet coexisting economies. One is a shrinking but still very much alive industrial based economy characterized by good pay and a large white- and blue-collar middle class. It is typified by union jobs in manufacturing and construction and a substantial number of gov ernment jobs. The other economy consists of service and IT occupations with a two-tiered system of inequality. The upper segment is char acterized by high skill and pay, job security, and high prestige. The lower tier offers low pay and little job security, and it consists of low-skill and low-prestige occupations. The metaphor is an hourglass; the economic differences are pro found.
10 John P. Koval
Political Managerialism and Chicago’s New Politics of Growth
Politics and Chicago are synonymous. In partic ular, mayoral politics has been integral in forging Chicago’s national and, in many cases, interna tional reputation. Although city politics over the past four decades represents a major converging force in shaping the new Chicago, the allocation of resources and power by three specific mayors reflects their different responses to social, eco nomic, and political changes in the city: Mayors Richard J. Daley, Harold Washington, and Richard M. Daley. Each has played a significant role in forming Chicago’s external image and in ternal workings. Each has responded differently to the shifting racial and ethnic mosaic that comprises the city. Building on the momentum created by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, black, Latino, and liberal white leaders constructed a political coalition that rocked the heretofore unbeatable Chicago Democratic Machine of Richard J. Daley and led to its first major defeats during the early 1970s.
It took a while to get there. Blacks, Latinos, and liberal, progressive whites coalesced in the mid to late 1960s around anti-Machine strate gies, flexed their collective muscle and, in 1972, ousted Mayor Richard J. Daley and his delega tion from the floor of the National Democratic Convention meeting in Chicago. The growing disaffection of black leaders and voters over what they perceived as inadequate returns for their long-term investments in and loyalty to the city’s regular Democratic organization led to defections from the organization by promi nent black politicians and sequential waves of voter revolts. By 1983, the stage was set for the election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first African American mayor. The Daley machine survived but never completely recovered from this defeat. City and county jobs, street-cleaning schedules, and garbage pick-up priorities re quired re-negotiation with new power brokers from the city’s black and Latino wards. Mean while, the expansion of the Chicago region di luted the city’s legislative influence in the Illinois state capital of Springfield and forced Chicago Democrats to move more cautiously when seek ing to bring state resources to bear on the city’s multiple problems.
Although his late father’s Democratic ma chine was in shreds by the time Richard M. Daley ascended to the mayoralty, in many respects Chicago’s second Mayor Daley has grasped power in the city just as effectively as did his father. In the city’s most recent may oral election, in February of 2003, Richard M. Daley carried 79% of the votes cast and won majorities in each of the city’s 50 wards. Al though a few of the mayor’s allies in the Chicago City Council faced ward-level challenges in the 2003 election, just as from 1999 to 2003, the current city council counts no more than three to four consistent mayoral critics among its 50 members (Washburn 2003, 4). Beyond mayor council relations, Richard M. Daley has built a �owerful base of support, drawn both from the elite circles of the city’s business and civic leadership and from the city’s older working class, newer Latino, and growing professional populations. As mayor, Daley has promoted sig nificant overhauls of Chicago’s public schools, the much-criticized Chicago Housing Author ity, and even the police department. In part, the political strength of Richard M. Daley must be attributed to his recasting of the image of Chicago city governance, downplaying its tra ditions of party influence and patronage, and emphasizing popular new approaches to gov ernment derived from the world of corporate management. Furthermore, the current Mayor Daley’s success is a function of the city’s evi dent success during the 1990s, a decade during which substantial portions of the central city experienced new infusions of commercial and residential investment, the first decade since the World War II era in which the decennial U.S. census registered an overall population gain for the city.
T he Transformation of Space
Space and the transformation of space is a ma jor component of the cultural canvas we all ex perience. We celebrate the birth of places with cornerstones, provide temporary immortality with historical landmarks, and mourn their passing with monuments. When we speak of “going home,” we mean not only returning to people but also returning to place and space. Space is also one of the great interpersonal and
cross-cultural identifiers. After asking a stranger, “What do you do?” we then typically ask, “Where are you from?” When we change space, we change ourselves. We use space to reinforce our sense of self as well as to shape it. Our structure and use of space is a public statement of who we are, who we want to be, and how we want oth ers to define us. Public space, the physical urban environment we call Chicago, also collectively announces who we are and what we declare our selves to be. This space too serves to shape our individual self-concept as well as our collective one.
The new Chicago has a new face. Over the course of the last two decades, the city and its metropolitan area has undergone a radical kind of spatial, structural, and aesthetic cos metic surgery. Chicago’s new face is the re sult of a team of practitioners at work: city, state, and local government; planners and ar chitects; business and industry; large and small scale developers; communities; interest groups; and individual property owners-to name but a few.
The City. Recently, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune was assailed by many Chicago-lovers for writing a story asserting the city no longer had an identity (Chicago Tribune 24 January 2003). Yet, the reporter was merely reporting a true but less than obvious reality. Some changes creep up on us relatively unnoticed until one day, we sud denly notice that the workplaces of the service and high-tech industry do not spout smoke and grit nor do their employees drive pickup trucks, carry lunch pails, wear steel-toed work boots, or stop off for a beer and chaser on the way home from work before trudging off to their 16″ sum mer softball game. Yes, Chicago has fewer lo cal taverns and more wine bars and fitness cen ters. Yes, Chicago has fewer broad shoulders and more firm pees. The steel mills are mostly gone, and manufacturing continues to decline. W hite ethnic immigrants of the past have mostly assim ilated, whereas more recent immigrants provide testimony to the reality of ethnic succession. So, indeed, the old Chicago image doesn’t really fit any more.
The city’s physical transformation has pretty much gone hand in hand with its economic transformation. And, because we cannot create
An Overview and Point of View 11
more space, the city has engaged in the pro cess of subtraction before addition. Much, but not all, of that subtraction serves two elements of the city’s new economy: tourism, a boom ing and multilayered new multimillion dollar industry, which is new in the sense that it has only recently been institutionalized as an in dustry; and the knowledge-based, service and high-tech world of business and commerce. The stockyards are long gone. High-rise public hous ing, a mistake in the first place, is soon to be history. West Madison, once the main street of Chicago’s Skid Row, has been transformed into a “nice” mixed-use commercial street, as has Maxwell Street, Chicago’s down-home version of London’s Portobello Road. An impoverished black neighborhood on Chicago’s near West Side was demolished to provide a home for the Chicago Bulls and creeping gentrification. The site of one of Chicago’s two large, urban, com mercial food markets-South Water Street, once the distribution center for many of Chicago’s wholesale fruit and vegetable vendors-is cur rently being incorporated into the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus. The other, the Randolph Street Market-the distribution center for meat, poultry, and fish purveyors is slowly but surely evolving into an area of urban lofts and chic restaurants. Some areas, such as the 100+ acres left by long-dead Wis consin Steel on Chicago’s far South Side, are still vacant pits waiting to be redefined and transformed.
The addition side of this equation is truly impressive. Chicago probably has not seen such rapid and comprehensive change since the Great Fire. And, as in the community response after the Fire, participation in this change process is extensive. It’s as if some unspoken common accord has been reached and, simultaneously, a cascade of government, civic, business, and citizen projects have rippled throughout the city and much of the metropolitan area. W holesale projects of renewal, expansion, conversion, and replacement can be seen almost everywhere. Class and race have not been neutralized, however; after all, this is still Chicago, the place where clout was perfected, so not all interests are served equally.
The spatial transformation is also a racial and class transformation. For decades, urbanologists
12 John P. Koval
warned of the likelihood, if not the certainty, that America’s inner cities would soon become mi nority ghettos surrounded by a suburban belt of middle- and upper-middle-class whites another failed prophesy, as it turns out. For, in the face of continued racial and minority spa tial segregation, Chicago is undergoing large scale gentrification (both black and white), uti lizing a new version of urban renewal, that has gone from trend to movement to near mania. And, in the process, gentrification has become a dirty word for many. Since “location, loca tion, location” -in this case closeness to work, restaurants, the lakefront, and entertainment is the dominant value, neighborhoods close to the Loop are experiencing the greatest transfor mation.
A new, relatively large, and unheralded army of well-trained, well-educated, and well paid professionals and administrators-the labor pool of an economically restructuring city-now calls the city home. Attracted to the lifestyle, amenities, and convenience of the city, they have become a relentless force for change. In some instances, they enjoy one-stop living in newly developed and developing high-rise communities-the city’s answer to suburbia’s gated communities. In other instances, entire neighborhoods are being transformed. For a generation, Lincoln Park and Hyde Park stood out as beachheads of up-scale urbanity on the north and south side of the Loop, and they did not appear likely to be joined by similar addi tional bastions. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, with the rise of the new economy, that Lincoln Park and Hyde Park changed from isolated urban anomalies to new urban models. Soon, neighborhoods like W icker Park, Bucktown, the Near West Side, and Dearborn Park emerged as new zones of urban gentrification. Some were formed largely through the rehab of existing housing stock, others by tear-downs and new construction.
The initial transformation took place in north and near north communities, in which the working class was simply driven out by force-the force of the checkbook. The check book has become a weapon of mass destruc tion in working-class and poor neighborhoods. It has produced a tide of rising property costs,
followed by a tide of rising property taxes, followed by a tide of departing working-class and poor residents. That tide soon spread westward and then southward and, most sur prising of all to urbanologists, to that inner most part of the inner city, the Loop. Aside from experiencing the physical transformation brought about by government, business, and commercial interests, the Loop and environs, for the first time in Chicago’s history, is be coming a major residential area. Here, high-rise villages and communities-interspersed with warehouse conversions-are literally popping up like so many mushrooms on a summer morn ing. The net result is the rise of a new residential city.
‘
The Metropolitan Area. Although we continue to use a “city-suburb” vocabulary in speaking about major metropolitan areas and their en virons, the reality is that most major cities in the country, Chicago included, are surrounded by a number of edge and satellite cities with vigorous, growing, and broad-scope economies. With few exceptions, these cities are increasingly areas of job growth and are the major cause for the “reverse commuting” of City of Chicago dwellers, who clog the expressways in the morn ing and evenings in their to-and-fro work-to home exodus.
The intense suburbanization of America’s cities during the 1950s and 1960s initially pro duced bedroom communities in which workers slept in their suburban homes and commuted to the city for work. Services and retail sales busi nesses soon followed these households to the suburbs and, by the 1970s and 1980s, so too did major businesses and industry. Currently, more people, more jobs, more businesses, and more industry exist in Chicago’s six collar counties than do in Chicago itself. This is a relatively new and radical change that has morphed bedroom communities into edge cities like Rosemont, Oakbrook, Hinsdale, and Schaumburg as well as satellite cities like Aurora, Naperville, Waukegan, and Elgin-replete with high-rise corporate campuses, vast industrial parks, and major hotel chains spiking a prairie skyline that sprouted nothing higher than corn stalks a few short years ago.
Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
The Chicago story has long been a story of mi gration and immigration. It once was the im migrant capital of the American heartland, and it currently ranks among the top five immi grant cities in America. A hundred and fifty years ago, during the 1850s and 1860s, about half of Chicago’s population was foreign-born. Over the decades, that proportion declined, un til it reached its low of 11.1% foreign-born in 1970. Since then, this figure has risen steadily and, by 2000, the proportion of foreign-born Chicagoans stood at 21.7% (INS, 1972-2000). On-going research suggests that this proportion may now be closer to 25% (WSJ.com. 2003).
Post World War II Chicago has seen two major demographic shifts. One, a white urban outflow-the movement of large numbers of the white community to the suburbs-and the other, the change of a white majority-black mi nority, two-race city into a geographically seg regated multiracial, multiethnic city. The white urban decline began during the 1950s and accel erated over the next two decades. The 1980s and 1990s saw a slowing of the white exodus and, by 2000, stabilization. In turn, the white popula tion in suburbia maintained a constant growth rate from the 1980s to 2000 and will probably do so into the foreseeable future.
The history of race relations in Chicago has always been less than admirable, and while statistically contemporary Chicago can be de scribed as a multiracial, multiethnic city, in re ality that less-than-admirable past is still with us. Demographic change over the past 20 years has resulted in a city with nearly equal propor tions of whites and African Americans and, by 2004, a near similar proportion of Hispanics. The statistics are deceptive, however, in that sig nificant racial and ethnic segregation still ex ists throughout the city. It is difficult to miss the irony in that, recently, analysts have down graded Chicago from being the most racially segregated city in the country to simply one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. As the racial-ethnic residential map in Chap ter 8 amply demonstrates, Chicago’s south- and west-side neighborhoods are black, its south central and west-central neighborhoods are
An Overview and Point of View 13
Hispanic, its north and northwest neighbor hoods are white, and small clusters of Asian and immigrant Eastern European neighborhoods dot near-South and near-North neighborhoods.
In the early days, new arrivals to Chicago from eastern and southern Europe were com plemented by the migration from south to north of black Americans who sought new economic and social freedoms within their own country. Current patterns of newly arriving residents to Chicago are a cultural and ethnic kaleidoscope drawn from all continents. The five most nu merous immigrant groups are illustrative of this wide range of national origins: Mexican, Polish, Indian, Filipino, and Korean.
While Chicago remains among the nation’s most racially segregated cites, jazz and blues mu sic attracts multiethnic groups to clubs in pre dominately white North Side neighborhoods. Ethnic areas, such as the Mexican communities of Pilsen and Little Village, and Chinatown and the South Asian-dominated portions of Devon Avenue, attract restaurant patrons from throughout the city, even as many immigrant families migrate outward and add to the ethnic and cultural mix of Chicago’s collar counties. In addition, diverse groups of new and old residents intersect in the classroom, workplace, and com mercial and recreational venues in a constant, if mostly informal, exchange of world cultures that in many ways reflects the immigration data. Observing residential interactions in the city is like viewing the shifting colors and patterns of the aggregated particles of a kaleidoscope.
CONTESTED REINVENTON
We call the convergence of these five forces globalization, economic restructuring, political managerialism, transformation of space, and race, ethnicity, and immigration-a process of “contested reinvention.” Contested reinvention speaks to the various visions, advocates, and modes of urban transformation that have played out in Chicago over the past two generations. With respect to vision, the new Chicago has been variously conceived as a postindustrial corporate center (by two generations of civic boosters, as well as by a series of city planning
14 John P. Koval
documents), as a racially inclusive city holding onto a substantial share of its mid twentieth cen tury industrial base (notably by economic de velopment officials in the Harold Washington administration), as an amenity-rich playground for the contemporary upper-middle class (the current Daley mayoral administration), and as an efficiently organized, environmentally sus tainable economic region (by the authors of 1998’s Chicago Metropolis 2020 plan). And as a cluster of more or less progressive neighbor hoods by various grassroots organizations.
As for advocacy, Chicago’s older polarization of voices-Democratic Party insiders versus anti-Machine advocates and central city versus suburban leaders-has given way to a compli cated mix of governmental reformers and tradi tionalists (read patronage- and contract-hungry political insiders). Others with development in terests, whom John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) have called “place entrepreneurs;’ as well as metropolitan-oriented business and civic leaders, neighborhood activists, and new con stituency (recent immigrant populations, gays and lesbians) advocates are also players. This partial cataloging of local voices is not meant to suggest that contemporary Chicago has be come, if you will, a war of all against all, but it does speak to the complexity of interests seeking to shape key features of the emergent metropoli tan community.
The modes by which this transformation will occur vary from the explicitly defined visions of a new Chicago revealed by various city plan ning documents to the especially grand Chicago Metropolis 2020 plan. In the chapters that follow, however, we also discuss the less self-conscious transformations of neighborhood space pro duced by new patterns of immigrant settle ment, or by the emergence of commercial en claves such as the gay-oriented “Boys Town” in the Lake View neighborhood and the gallery and-entertainment districts of River North and W icker Park. Of course, such neighborhood transformations often produce conflict between working-class outgoers and prosperous incom ers, and even between the first-wave of student artist gentrifiers and subsequent loft and condo minium purchasers. But, contested reinvention also speaks to the parallel changes reflected by
gentrification in some sections of the city, new immigrant settlement in both central city and suburban communities, and the efforts of some suburban towns to create new, downtown-like commercial cores. In short, we can assert that a new Chicago is emerging. Because of the mul tiple dreams at work across this metropolis, the multiple dreamers, and the unpredictability of many of their interactions, we also recognize that our central aim of defining the predominant di rections of change will probably elude our pow ers of prognostication.
Thus, with this introductory chapter- Part I of The New Chicago-we have explained the scale and purpose of our enterprise and, as well, we have outlined our primary lines of analysis. Iti Part II of the book, we disjlggregate the five converging forces and deal in detail with each in separate chapters. Because we believe the five converging forces are essential for understand ing how a new Chicago emerged, it becomes es pecially important to elaborate on the role of each in that process. We see these forces in part as structural pilings that serve as a foundation for a new Chicago and in part as interrelated strands of a strong spider-like web in which no movement or activity takes place in one strand without affecting all the others.
Part III has several chapters dedicated to past and present ethnic and racial groups. Because people energize and bring alive the four other converging forces, and because immigration is dramatically altering the human composition and culture of Chicago, extensive description and analysis is contained here. For, as complex as other converging forces are, the human forces are even more complex and produce distinctive and ever-changing dynamics. Black and white relations, while still evolving and never static, have a long and exceptionally uneven history in Chicago, and we will analyze the emerging pat terns of the “postmodern” construction of race and race relations. Immigration over the past quarter-century has added new cultures, races, and religions to Chicago’s social mix that fur ther alter the politics, economy, geography, and culture of metropolitan Chicago. Not only are there new players, but players who-by their very presence-change the nature of existing, older social dynamics and add a new and even
more complex set of dynamics of their own. While large numbers are no guarantee of social, political, or economic influence, we have lim ited our analysis of Chicago immigrants to those seven groups that constitute approximately 60% of all legal immigrants to Chicago since 1972: immigrants from Mexico, Poland, India, the Philippines, Korean, China, and the Middle East.
Part IV consists of a series of case studies on selected topics and issues. A metropolitan area like Chicago is a vast and multilayered net work of actors, organizations, institutions, ge ographies, and interest groups, daunting in its complexity. In turn, people, organizations, and government in Chicago are responding to the converging forces and also trying to give shape to the new Chicago in an intentional fashion. The vignettes in this section were chosen: (I) to simplify this complexity by examining in de tail a selective series of issues, or cases, of recent or current vintage that, collectively, have con tributed to making Chicago what it is today and (2) to illustrate some of the main lines of ac tive reshaping pursued by various groups in the region. The case studies are intended to illus trate the effect of converging forces on social and political institutions and organizations, as
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An Overview and Point of View 15
well reveal the role of people, interest groups, organizations, and governments in the framing, processing, and outcomes of these forces.
Part V, the final section of the book, does two things. First, it reintroduces the overall point of view of the book-the converging forces-and the case studies and merges them into an inte grated description of a new Chicago in a global world. Second, it takes these “lessons from the Chicago experience” and moves beyond them to identify principles and processes found in the Chicago story that might apply to other urban areas in this country and to other regions of our postindustrial world. It ends with a glimpse of different cultures waiting to be born.
NOTE
Acknowledgments. My thanks to Larry Bennett for being a thoughtful and helpful critic as well as enrich ing this chapter by writing the two sections: “Political Managerialism” and “Contested Reinvention.”
1. James Bryce, the British Ambassador to the United States, appears to have been the first person to make this claim (in 1888). Since that time, several other observers and scholars made near-identical state ments about Chicago, the latest being Mayor Richard M. Daley, hardly a nonpartisan urban analyst.
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