Successful Protect-Community Discourse: Spatiality and Politics in Chicago's Pilsen Neighborhood

David Wilson, Jared Wouters and Dennis Grammenos
Additional contact information
Dennis Grammenos: Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, 500 N St Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625, USA

Environment and Planning A, 2004, vol. 36, issue 7, 1173-1190

Abstract: Protect-community movements across America are alive and well. The authors examine one such movement in a Chicago working-class neighborhood—Pilsen. They focus on a discourse oppositional to gentrification that has effectively mobilized space and historicity to speak its truths. The results reveal that diverse mental spaces were constructed and used in discourse to offer two critical constructions: positive resident identities, and developers as villains. Such spaces, grounding medium in the discourse, framed, organized, and illuminated these constructions. This visual rhetoric, Henri Lefebvre's representation of spaces, was a key ingredient in discourse. With actual and threatened opposition to gentrification, many developers formed a sense of a ‘ready-to-rumble neighborhood’. Fears of virulent street tactics (that is, harassment of gentrifiers) most discouraged developers because they could make development projects risky.

Date: 2004
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a36121 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:36:y:2004:i:7:p:1173-1190

DOI: 10.1068/a36121

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().