Silencing, Urban Growth Machines, and the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side

Abstract

Recent research on growth machines, in a prominent theme, has focused on how mobilized discourses promote urban redevelopment projects. Pushed to the margins, in this work, has been the issue of how alternative growth visions and voices are silenced or muffled. This article examines the notion of “silencing” in urban growth discourses. Silencing, it is argued, should not be understood as censorship but rather as attempts by growth machines to relativize the importance of critical and dissent voices in redevelopment projects. We believe that to understand how redevelopment projects operate and transform (urban) spaces, such rhetorical peripherialization is as important as pro-growth discourses. In developing this argument, the article focuses on the case study of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's Southeast Side. An OPC growth machine consisting of the Obama Foundation, the city mayor, the University of Chicago, and a coalition of local business and community organizations practices this simultaneity of offering their voice and undercutting alternative voices in adroit ways. Race, it is argued, is at the center of this systematic suppression. The OPC development provides an important example of how current redevelopment in cities across the global west currently proceeds.

Community Benefits Through an Anchor: Contestations During the Planning of the Obama Presidential Center

“…The WHPO differs from a CBA in key ways; the Foundation is not financially or legally responsible for any stipulations in the ordinance. It is also less robust than the original CBA as it only focuses on housing and offers protections for one neighborhood; the OPC will impact housing prices in a far greater radius than just Woodlawn (Schwarze and Wilson 2022; Voorhees Center 2019).…”

“… 4. See Schwarze and Wilson (2022) for their case study of the OPC using a growth-machine approach. In addition to my argument that the OPC is not a traditional growth machine, the two approaches differ in that the authors focus on the pertinent historic preservation debate over the anchor’s construction in public parkland.…”