Correction at Cabrini-Green: A Sociospatial Exercise of Power

Abstract

Foucault developed theories on the exercise of power so that they might be applied to geographically and historically specific instances, In this paper I analyze the processes of power recently in operation on the black population of the Cabrini-Green housing development in Chicago. Previously excluded from the larger urban matrix, the residents have been subject to a variety of forces—Involving discipline, discursive containment, physical repression, and deterrence —as attempts have been made to ‘reclaim’ the area and regulate the sociospatial control of bodies. Issues of visibility, knowledge, and situation are paramount both in the processes of power involved in ‘rehabilitating’ Cabrini-Green and in the residents' resistance to such outside intervention.

Urban Representation as Politics

“…Murray (1995), for example, examines the production of truth and power in Chicago that impugns the Cabrini-Green housing project and its residents. Murray uses Foucault's notion of power to reveal a representation of this space and its residents that disciplines and contains.…”

Looking at / Looking with Public Housing Residents in 1990s Chicago: Shifting the Stigma of Place-Based Visibility in Social-Spatial Images

“…23 As a vulnerable policeman on unfamiliar and opaque ground, McInerney experiences the project's architecture mostly as an obstacle to vision. Drawing on a Foucauldian theorization of oversight, communications scholar Matthew Murray has defined Cabrini-Green as an inverted panopticon, where those inside the buildings and on their fenced galleries are hidden from view and can watch over anyone approaching; 24 visuality as an instrument and deployment of authority does not work there. But the policeman turns his vulnerability in the order of vision into a strength, when he mediates his experience to fellow outsiders and produces an exterior knowledge of life in Cabrini-Green for those who do not live there and can therefore supposedly identify with the outsiderness of the "you" in the text.…”