From Revanchism to Inclusion: Institutional Forms of Planning and Police in Hyde Park, Chicago

Abstract

Planning and policing are two critical racial projects in the racial state. Planning scholars’ understanding of the police usually focuses on the police violently removing people from urban space, yet critical criminology literature shows their function to be more diverse. I employ an exploratory case study, centered in the South Side of Chicago, to develop propositions to guide emergent research that centralizes the police within planning. The propositions (1) impel further investigation into how police not only exclude people but also define who belongs and (2) draw attention to how planning institutions can create new forms of police.

Biking Where Black: Connecting Transportation Planning and Infrastructure to Disproportionate Policing

“…Single family zoning, for example, effectively excluded people of color from white neighborhoods, and the development of many freeways and railways divided and destroyed Black and Brown communities. In Chicago specifically, research has traced how planning for redevelopment around the University of Chicago campus coincided with a geographic expansion of university police patrols whose purpose was to regulate belonging in a racially-mixed neighborhood surrounded by majority Black neighborhoods (Sherman, 2020). But various traffic safety approaches, including some implementations of Vision Zero, link together transportation planning and policing in explicit ways.…”

Operationalizing the open city concept: A case study of Berlin

“…Perceived as an entity for maintaining the security of cities, Jacobs (1961) argued that safety is not primarily achieved through police presence. In fact, certain police practices can challenge openness by isolating social groups or influencing who belongs in a space (Sherman, 2020). Therefore, CCTV density and police presence were considered as variables that negatively influence the OC.…”

What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging

“…Planning’s commitment to property accounts for planning’s entanglements with colonialism (Porter, 2010) and explains how settler colonialism (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019) and racial capitalism are spatialized as urban processes that render urbanization always anti-Indigenous and always anti-Black (Dorries, et al., 2019; Rutland, 2018). Through state-driven processes that hinge on the reproduction of racial hierarchies, propertied landscapes become intertwined with geographies of criminalization, surveillance, and incarceration (Garcia-Hallett, et al., 2020; Sherman, 2020; Simpson et al., 2020) and contribute to the displacement and dispossession of racialized and economically marginalized communities (Blomley, 2004; Roy, 2003, 2006).…”