Famous for its deep-rooted segregation, Chicago is in a sense two cities. It is a place with ‘glittering buildings surrounded by crumbling neighborhoods’ (p. 270). As I write this review, the gulf between affluent lakefront and deprived south-west communities is made apparent by the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in the outlying areas. The pandemic brings to the fore the concept of a dual city where racially and socio-economically segregated neighbourhoods produce drastically different outcomes for their inhabitants. In The Origins of the Dual City: Housing, Race, and Development in Twentieth-Century Chicago, Joel Rast examines changing anti-slum initiatives. For most of the twentieth century, political leaders tried to eradicate blighted neighbourhoods that they believed could spread and threaten healthy communities. When attempts failed, they decided instead to ignore the problem. The concept of a dual city emerged in the 1970s after policy-makers learned that ‘urban decline in one city location was not incompatible with growth and affluence elsewhere’ (p. 4).
Privatism, or a belief in limited government oversight, shaped progressive-era reformers’ anti-slum measures requiring property-owners to maintain housing. Enforcement was hindered by corrupt politicians who did not hold city inspectors accountable. The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and overcrowding in segregated black ghettos, also contributed to the failure of restrictive regulations as a means for fixing slum conditions. The idea that housing reform was about rebuilding poverty-stricken neighbourhoods for the benefit of low-income residents gave way to a new set of goals focused on redeveloping those areas to maximize profit. The public–private partnerships of urban renewal in the 1940s demolished substandard structures and replaced them with housing for the middle class. Empowered by the election of Mayor Richard Daley in 1955, business leaders redeveloped land near the city's centre for its best and highest value use. Impoverished people were displaced to public high-rise housing units where deindustrialization and attendant job loss further concentrated poverty. Rather than eradicating blighted areas, revitalization efforts reproduced them. By 1970, powerbrokers had embraced a ‘development agenda featuring both gentrification and the tacit acceptance of entrenched high-poverty neighborhoods’ (p. 264). To keep deprivation at a safe distance, they constructed a defensible corridor around the city centre. Built in 1977, the Dearborn Park residential development re-established a solid white presence on downtown's southern flank. External threats from nearby low-income neighbourhoods were mitigated through price, design and planning. Residential space was unaffordable for most black people. Gates, fences, landscaping and one-way circular streets discouraged access to the compound. Nearby bus stops and stores were kept to a minimum to discourage foot traffic in the surrounding area. The plan worked and served as a model for other developments. Nearly 50 years later Chicago's black and white residents occupy separate worlds.
Joel Rast's well-researched historical study draws on archival collections held at Chicago area university libraries. Some of his most engaging descriptions of the city are ethnographic. The book's biggest contribution to the field of urban history is the importance it places on ideational change. Previous studies have emphasized economic and political or material interests. To understand fully the motivations and behaviours of urban planners, according to Rast, attention must be paid to how their decisions are shaped by conventional wisdom. As a regular visitor to downtown Chicago, I know how easy it is to get wrapped-up in all that is wonderful about the city. Museums and other attractions effectively blind people to deprivation on the periphery. Origins of the Dual City is a powerful reminder that Chicago was purposefully designed this way and that nature or individual preference cannot explain the night and day differences between its neighbourhoods. Additionally, it is revealing that key architects of the dual city model lived in the racially segregated suburbs north of Chicago that I study. Most notably, Holman Pettibone and Milton Mumford who laid the groundwork for the model in the 1950s, and Mayor Emmanuel Rahm who later deepened the divide between high income and high poverty areas through his gentrification policies and public school closures. No book can cover every aspect of a topic; still, I would have liked to learn more about how invisible boundaries between neighbourhoods are constructed, maintained and enforced. How is it, for example, that problems, like gun violence, experienced in one area rarely bleed into another?
Origins of the Dual City traces how Chicago's economically disadvantaged areas went from ‘places to be rehabilitated to places to be managed and policed’ (p. 267). Today, city boosters brag about urban renaissance and ‘comeback cities’ even as poverty and hopelessness become more entrenched (p. 267). Rast warns us that our tacit acceptance of deprivation only serves to perpetuate it. We have learned to live with poverty, we must unlearn to live with it.
