Blues club s today in Chicago ās largely African-American, poor South Side feel the winds of transformation. As part of a stepped-up areal remaking, more clubs experience a surge of new faces, upgraded physical features, altered drink offerings, and a revised social aesthetic that changes working-class-dominated blues joints. The new faces, often white and more affluent, trek in from other parts of Chicago , Europe , Australia , and other international locations. Swanky ales and wines once banned from South Side blues venues (associated with downtown and North Side clubs) suddenly appear on the drink docket. Newer patrons, often swelling in numbers, step up their exoticizing and admiring of purported black authenticity (often imagined as transported from Africa to the Delta to Chicago) that these clubs supposedly embed. These changes, at first glance simple physical alterations, are also deep symbolic elements that communicate to many (particularly long-term regular patrons and musicians) something disconcerting: the possibility of an āoutsiderā race-class takeover of a coveted social space.
This is not merely a continued urban change but something new: a calculated foray to transform the poorest, most neglected, and stigmatized blocks in the city that few urbanists could have predicted. These areas are, to many in the city, the worst of the worst. Gentrification -centered redevelopment targets these clubs and their blocks, representing an ascendant trend we know little about. At its core, Chicago today experiences an explosion of this redevelopment (as now official government policy) powered by glittery discourses. Redevelopment interests in Chicago have never before exerted this kind of pressure to upscale targeted blocks in these areas. Amid the South Side ās physical carnage from the recent sub-prime mortgage lending that still afflicts it (more than 33,000 buildings currently sit abandoned), acres of blocks (especially its blues club s) seem ripe for a possible surge of this redeveloping. Area residents reeling from decades of public- and private-sector neglect and more recently toxic sub-prime lending now awaken to the dawn of another battle on their hands as a different kind of capital accumulation extends its tentacles.
Drawn to this latest redevelopment , this book interrogates this processās current procedures and impacts. It examines how a Chicago powerhouseāwhat I term as its racial redevelopment machine āoperates and affects South Side neighborhoods, their residents, and especially this resource in these communities, blues club s. Most generally, we know little about how these machine actors currently operate as they move into this new terrain. Machine actors (city councilors, the mayor, government officials, developers, allied business people) navigate people and institutions whose deepened poverty, stigma, and institutional neglect may make them formidable obstacles to a successful restructuring. So, what is their mode of operation: styles of conduct, kinds of social constructing, patterns of intervention? Are these adaptable and improvisationally creative formations? At the same time, these underexplored clubs, as important foci, are threatened with extinction through upscaling that parallels another current threat, sagging revenues and closure (these neighborhoods have become poorer given the dysfunctionality of Chicago ās structurally driven labor markets). How are these vulnerable clubs and patrons being affected as encroaching commodification imposes a new dynamic on these clubs?
At its core, the machine promotes a rhetoric, as important as any physical and social remaking, that introduces possibilities for a bold upper-class commercialization of blues club s and their blocks. These clubs and blocks, for decades ignored for formal redevelopment , are now discussed by city officials and business heads as historic, culturally salvageable, and ripe for inclusion in the drive to further Chicago ās āgo-globalā remaking efforts. A proclaimed rediscovery of the black experience now increasingly centers, for bourgeois consumption, āblack culture,ā āraw blues musical performance,ā and āexotic black ways.ā Three things are celebrated in the new rhetoric: āoutsiderāsā new opportunities for cultural experiences, blues club s as a viable model for what the South Side can socially be, and how these clubs can enrich the go-global Chicago project. South Side Alderman D. Tillman (2009) note d these three things: āthe clubs are being rediscovered ā¦ theyāve been there, now everyone is coming to realize their value and heritage ā¦ and this recognition will help the South Side and the entire city ā¦ itāll help stabilize our neighborhoods and help the city move forward ā¦ itās a win-win for all.ā
To be clear, this physical and social transformation of Chicago ās South Side and its blues club s is still highly uneven and unfolding in various stages. Clubs and their blocks north of 54th Street in the Bronzeville area (22ndā52nd) are most significantly changing. For example, the historic Checkerboard on 52nd Street (momentarily closed but seemingly reopening soon) now experiences significant upgrading. New kinds of customers, a new ambiance, and new kinds of entertainment are the current reality. Similarly, clubs further south, like Club 7313 on 73rd, have begun to feel the effects. Club owners, responding to the narrative of a progressive and positive alteration, have initiated small changesāin drink offerings, music, club veneer, and marketing strategies. Other clubs and their blocks, like Celebrity Lounge on 83rd, may soon feel the effects but have yet to experience any noticeable alterations. Much of the South Side still experiences neglect and disinvestment, and in this broad frame, portions of the area begin to feel the pressure of the new gentrif ication-fired redevelopment with their clubs changing in fits and spurts.
In addressing these issues, I desire to move beyond the now standard story of such redevelopment machine s as being masters and blunt producers of unfolding redevelopment and equally important, as engaging power-bereft people on the ground. This prominent story line, for all of its insight, often marginalizes turbulence, contradictions, human interpretation, growth machine struggle, and resistive politics in redevelopment . Seen this different way, redevelopment outcomes may be remarkably diverse and become more of an improvisational human accomplishment than a predictable fait accompli. It becomes especially important to complicate this story now, I believe, with something new here: the move into the new redevelopment frontier and its aged but vibrant blues club blocks. Along this frontier, the deepened poverty and stigma from being racialized and living on the South Side (Anderson and Sternberg 2012) mean that machine actors must adroitly engage people, while this poverty and stigma are also the complicated lens through which people come to know and respond to this encroachment. I reveal that with current constructions of blackness and poverty being negotiated along this new frontier, there is significant newness in machine strategy and operation and in how blues club populations mediate and respond.
The political stakes of knowing more about and appropriately responding to this redevelopment are important. Most generally, we know too little about this redevelopment machine as it continues to neoliberalize city form and city social relations. It today exacerbates uneven development and socio-spatial polarization among its numerous impacts while, paraphrasing Rancier (1999), relentlessly making and distributing āthe sensible.ā Planning for a more equitable and fair Chicago requires a dive into politicsāformal and informalāpredicated on knowing how these machines currently operate. So, how is this redevelopment machine currently operating rhetorically and through actions? Is it vulnerable to being de-stabilized, reformed, or replaced? Will it remain as is (currently constituted) into the foreseeable future? In Chicago , contestation remains elusive as this machine for the moment glories in glittery aspirations and audacious presentations of self.
At the same time, this drive to transform blues club s and blocks afflicts something important to these populations, what has been called their right to the city (Lefebvre 1981). Without dwelling on this concept at length, the right to the city concept, originated by Henri Lefebvre (1981) and rec ently discussed by David Harvey (2012), is far mo re than individual liberties to access urban resources. It is a right of collectivities of people to dictate kinds of change in their communities and the broader city through building space. Poor racialized people, like others, should thus be able to manage redevelopment that they can further nuance over time. This right, Harvey suggests, is one of the most precious yet most neglected of human rights. Current redevelopment along Chicago ās new redevelopment frontier seems to violate this. This population has been afflicted by harmful redevelopment before (destructive bulldozers and slum clearance, public housing disinvestment and neglect, block grant negligence). Now, pain redux is on the scene again, while one dominant aspect of this latest redevelopment āhow it impacts club users and the clubs themselvesāremains sketchy and unclear.
The bookās structure and organization follow from this set of goals. Chapter 2 lays out the studyās preliminaries, initially discussing the studyās objectives, theoretical framework, and importance. It then provides an overview of the key subject matters in the book: the nature of gentrif ication-centered redevelopment and Chicago ās past and present blues club scene. Finally, I discuss the methods used in this study. These discussions highlight a conceptual need: to transcend the now tired story of powerful, brutish neoliberal governances effortlessly producing gentrif ication-centered redevelopment . I suggest it is crucial to complicate this story recognizing that these machine actors now engage (and are engaged by) something different from before: aged, racialized blues club s and their large base of creative but extremely poor, stigmatized people.
Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapter by moving into the present. It dissects this current machine as its actors operate across one scaleāChicago āin its latest stage of actions (post 2000). I excavate these actorās goals and the rhetoric they create and work through their plans and strategies and their presentation of self. This chapter, crucial to the study, frames the analysis of these actorsā actions along the South Side redevelopment frontier (Chap. 4). To know the ambitions, designs, and functioning that defines current redevelopment citywi...