Notes on women in the global city: Chicago

As the organizers of an event on women in the global city, we wanted to create a forum exploring the intersections of class, gender and other forms of inequality that fracture ‘global Chicago’. In the panelists' discussion of the intersections of struggles relating to housing, education and environmental justice in Chicago's particular version of the global city, we found evidence of lives disrupted by neoliberal trends, as well as possible sites to contest these disruptions. These struggles reverberate to shape a new urban vision, as the academics and activists assembled for our panel aim not just to work on the local issues of specific women, but to create a city in which work is well compensated, housing is affordable for everyone, schools educate all children well, all neighborhoods are safe both from crime and environmental pollutants, and everyone has the time to fully engage as active citizens of the city.     

美国芝加哥艺术学院藏中国陶瓷艺术品

美国芝加哥艺术学院位于芝加哥密歇根大道亚当街区,它是美国顶尖的艺术教育机构之一,由博物馆和学校两部分组成,建校于1866年。由于地处交通方便、学术风气自由的国际化大都市,各种国际性的展览以及学术交流讲座多以芝加哥艺术学院为中心开展。艺术学院的博物馆以收藏大量印象派作品以及美国艺术品著称,     

Functional Types of Satellite Towns in the Chicago Conurbation

A synthetic functional typology of the suburbs of Chicago is proposed. It is based on the following criteria: (1) the character of economic functions (industry, trade, services, residential), (2) the magnitude of functions, (3) population size as a measure of the residential function, (4) the level of development of functions (young suburb, mature suburb), and (5) the degree or character of participation in various interurban relations: production, journey to work, shopping, or recreation.     

Chicago goes global: redevelopment,culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.