Debunking the Mythical Discourse Surrounding Public Housing: Part IV of the UHA 2012

In ToM's final installment of its 2012 UHA coverage, our correspondents present a detailed report regarding one of the conference's perpetually most popular subjects: public housing. With a packed house in attendance, the UHA’s six roundtable presenters provided a coherent and compelling argument against prevailing myths regarding public housing.  Considering the success of documentaries like The Pruitt Igoe myth in recent years, new interpretations of public housing’s legacy have come to the fore. Leading figures in urban housing including Kenneth Jackson and Alexander Von Hoffman among others attended, making for a lively post presentation discussion.   From Le Corbusier influenced …

What’s Really at Stake in the Teacher Strike

In the last week Chicago's teacher strike has galvanized debate nationwide about schools, labor, and the so-called "education reforms" championed by both the right and liberals in the Obama administration.  These reforms include tying teacher pay not to seniority but to various metrics (primarily standardized test scores) and privatization schemes such as semi-public charter schools and vouchers.  Besides the immediate issues of pedagogy and policy, the Chicago strike is occurring in a political context in which Republican governors across the country, most notably Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, have worked assiduously to strip public workers of their bargaining rights …

Rahmbo v CTU: A Bruising Battle for the Heart of the Democratic Party and School Reform

The unions cannot strike in Chicago. . . . They will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold. -- Johah Edelman, Executive Director Stand for Children on Illinois legislation Senate Bill 7 It’s like like the Mos Def lyrics in Mathematics, 'Why did one straw break the camel's back? Here's the secret: the million other straws underneath it - it's all mathematics.' -- Interview with a striking Chicago grade school teacher, 9/12/2012 To some ears, Senate Bill 7 sounds like an obscure punk band out of Venice Beach.  One can just imagine concert posters with a toothy caricature of Bill Clinton in punk garb surrounded by six dour Senators equally as dismal in their appearance …

Dog Days Classics: Political Boss and Midwestern Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Legacy

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) and American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (2001) Few cities outside of New York have drawn the kind of critical attention like the capital of the American Midwest, Chicago. The Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, the Second City, and numerous other titles have sought to capture the essence of Chicago. Though far younger than New York, Chicago’s historiography covers numerous ethnic and racial groups, changing as the city’s face has changed over the course of the 20th century. Harold Gosnell’s Machine Politics: The Chicago Model provided one of the clearest takes by a political scientist regarding …

Dog Days Classics: Robert Caro’s Controversial Portrait of Robert Moses and New York

“Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” - David Halberstam Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1974 Since its initial 1974 publication, rarely has book dominated a subject the way Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has. Caro defined Moses as an overbearing, racist, once idealistic public servant who became an obsessed power mongering city planner single handedly undermining New York’s neighborhoods and communities through massive highway and public works projects. Under Caro’s watchful eye, Moses crafted cities much as Le Corbusier might have decades earlier, all flow and no people. Minority and low income communities found …

Pedaling Your Politics: The Variable Meanings of Critical Mass

Over the past two decades, the prevalence of biking in our nation’s cities has increased rapidly. Never mind unique creations like Portland, Oregon, today, places as diverse as New York, Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, and Austin have vibrant cycling cultures. In San Diego, a Saturday night without a fixie would be like Sunday morning without Mass (for those of us influenced by popery). The same could be said for Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Silver Lake, CA and elsewhere. This increase in bike culture stems from several forces. Environmental concerns, energy issues, aesthetics, and the appropriation of subcultures (after all it would be impossible to say that aspects of hipster aesthetics …

Goats, Swords, & Fried Oreos: The Old 321 Flea Market as a Landscape of Globalization

The Old 321 Flea Market in Dallas, NC is now known as the I-85/321 Flea Market, even though it is even farther from Interstate 85 than it is from Highway 321.  The name change is most likely designed to lure the bargain hunters who seek out flea markets to come to the small town of Dallas by suggesting that the market is right off the interstate, when it is actually situated in a semi-rural stretch of town on the way to the even tinier hamlet of High Shoals. But the name change also reflects the greater connection of Dallas and Gaston County in general to the broader world, as symbolized by the interstate that connects the area's mill villages to a more cosmopolitan circuit of commerce …

The World in 2011

As regular readers know, we at Tropics of Meta try in all things to be as much like the Economist as possible.  For this reason, we have consulted a distinguished panel of historians, political scientists, fishmongers and Daley machine hacks to weigh in on their expectations for the year 2011.  Their predictions range from likely events in academia and politics to music, fiction, and fast food -- and sometimes a combination of these fields.  So without further ado, we give you the shape of things to come: ........................................................... The writers of the defunct TV show Lost will admit they were just kidding and air a new sixth season. Columbia University …

FIRE and ICE: The Realities of 21st Century Urban Development

Modern day urban development shares similarities with its antecedents but also clearly exists in a new economic, political, and social reality. The industries long responsible for driving urban growth remain significant (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, hence the acronym FIRE) but new economic engines (or in the case of universities old ones with new mandates) and organized resistance have changed the face of the game. Community and neighborhood associations, like those led by Jane Jacobs in opposition to Robert Moses’s development in Greenwich Village, persist in surprisingly entrenched forms. Furthermore, NIMBYism’s prominence over the past three decades raises as many questions as …

Ghost in the Machine: The Invisibility of Richard M. Daley’s New Political Base

The announcement that Richard M. Daley would not seek reelection as Chicago’s mayor surprised few people. A Midwestern institution, a Daley has occupied the top seat in city hall for over 50 years, yet the current Daley, not unlike his father Richard J., had begun to look thread worn. The late great Chicago columnist Mike Royko savaged the elder Daley in Boss but also acknowledged that there was something uniquely Chicago about the old man: “Maybe he couldn’t have been a father figure in Berkeley, California; Princeton, New Jersey; or even Skokie, Illinois. But in Chicago there was nothing unusual about a father who worked long hours, meant shut up when he said shut up, and backed it …