Synopses & Reviews
In 1995 a half-vacant public housing project on Chicagoandrsquo;s Near West Side fell to the wrecking ball. The demolition and reconstruction of the Henry Horner housing complex ushered in the most ambitious urban housing experiment of its kind: smaller, mixed-income, and partially privatized developments that, the thinking went, would mitigate the insecurity, isolation, and underemployment that plagued Chicago's infamously troubled public housing projects.
Focusing on Hornerandrsquo;s redevelopment, Catherine Fennell asks how Chicagoandrsquo;s endeavor transformed everyday built environments into laboratories for teaching urbanites about the rights and obligations of belonging to a city and a nation that seemed incapable of taking care of its most destitute citizens. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic and archival research, she shows how collisions with everything from haywire heating systems and decaying buildings to silent neighbors became an education in the possibilities, but also the limits, of collective care, concern, and protection in the aftermath of welfare failure.
As she documents how the materiality of both the unsuccessful older projects and the recently emerging housing fosters feelings of belonging and loss, her work engages larger debates in critical anthropology and poverty studiesandmdash;and opens a vital new perspective on the politics of space, race, and development in urban America
About the Author
Catherine Fennell is assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University.and#160;
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Across Damen
Part I. Sympathy
andldquo;Toward a Better Lifeandrdquo;
2. The Many Harms of Staying Here
3. Project Heat and Sensory Politics
Part II. Civics
Radio Rumors
4. Experiments in Vulnerability
5. The City, the Grassroots, the Poverty Pimps
Part III. Publics
Resurrections
6. The Museum of Resilience
Epilogue: Raising Sympathetic Publics
Notes
Bibliography
Index