By Salem Collo-Julin — Free stuff is considered necessary, surprising, and sometimes suspect. People never want to take free stuff when it’s handed to them on the street. You wonder if the giver is really trying to sell you something, or proselytizing, or both. It’s hard on givers as well. You give something away and wonder if someone else [...]
By Pauline Lipman — The new world order is coming to roost in Chicago with a vengeance. Increasingly the city is defined by Neoliberalism, the global policies of transnational capital that make the market and individual self-interest primary in every sphere of economic and social life. On every side we see the elimination of the public interest and public [...]
By Ryan Hollon — If you drive through Chicago’s West Side you will see blocks full of factories that are either abandoned or on their way to being abandoned. If you live on the West Side, or if you drive there and get out of your car long enough to talk to people, you will find that there are [...]
By Martha Boyd — On December 1, 2005 Mayor Daley announced that the City would be initiating a “Community Land Trust” (CLT) initiative to secure affordable housing for Chicago residents. Below are notes and questions relating to this news as well as the official press release announcing the Land Trust. 1. A succinct summary and questions I had written [...]
By Faith Agostinone Wilson — The images and visuals used within this curriculum unit focus on Waukegan, Illinois, a city of 88,000 people located on the shores of Lake Michigan, 40 miles north of Chicago. However, it is hoped that area educators, activists, and artists will collaborate on similar visual sociologies within their own neighborhoods and communities in the Chicago [...]
By Claire Pentecost — In October 2005, the Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC)* published a study mapping the distribution of major player supermarkets in Chicago, against the racial and economic patterns of the city neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, the neighborhoods with a majority of black and poor residents had few if any major player grocery stores. On the other hand, [...]
By Brian Holmes — I’d like to begin this text with a little anecdote. Recently, I spent some time in New York City. Having lived outside the US for some fifteen years now, one of the things you wonder about when you come back—one of the little anxieties—is “what exactly am I gonna eat?” The food system in Europe [...]
By Daniel Tucker — Our scale determines our goals. At the recent international meeting of the Peoples Global Action (PGA) alternative globalization network in Haridwar (India), there was an explicit call for pga-affiliated groups to literally map themselves on the globe. Articulating the scale of its own organization and the various relationships to local contexts across the globe, the [...]
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