Friday, January 3, 2020

Eric Klinenberg's Heatwave; A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

Eric Klinenberg is a sociology professor at NYU who studied the 1995 heat wave in Chicago that killed over 700 people.  




A preview of Heatwave is available on Amazon

From Goodreads,
In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.
Starting with the question of why so many people died at home alone, Klinenberg investigates why some neighborhoods experienced greater mortality than others, how the city government responded to the crisis, and how journalists, scientists, and public officials reported on and explained these events. Through a combination of years of fieldwork, extensive interviews, and archival research, Klinenberg uncovers how a number of surprising and unsettling forms of social breakdown—including the literal and social isolation of seniors, the institutional abandonment of poor neighborhoods, and the retrenchment of public assistance programs—contributed to the high fatality rates. The human catastrophe, he argues, cannot simply be blamed on the failures of any particular individuals or organizations. For when hundreds of people die behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, community groups, and public agencies, everyone is implicated in their demise.
As Klinenberg demonstrates in this incisive and gripping account of the contemporary urban condition, the widening cracks in the social foundations of American cities that the 1995 Chicago heat wave made visible have by no means subsided as the temperatures returned to normal. The forces that affected Chicago so disastrously remain in play in America's cities, and we ignore them at our peril.

Marco D'Eramo's The Pig and the Skyscraper




Marco D'Eramo's The Pig and the Skyscraper is a series of critiques of Capitalism vis-a-vis Chicago.  D'Eramo is an Italian sociologist who studied with Pierre Bourdieau.  


From Goodreads
Like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Walter Benjamin, Marco d’Eramo stalks the streets of Chicago, leaving no myth unturned. Maintaining a European’s detached gaze, he slowly comes to recognize the familiar stink of modernity that blows across the Windy City, the origins of whose greatness (the slaughterhouses, the railroads, the lumber and cereal-crop trades) are by now ancient history, and where what rears its head today is already scheduled for tomorrow’s chopping block.
Chicago has been the stage for some of modernity’s key episodes: the birth of the skyscraper, the rise of urban sociology, the world’s first atomic reactor, the hard-nosed monetarism of the Chicago School. Here in this postmodern Babel, where the contradictions of American society are writ large, d’Eramo bears witness to the revolutionary, subversive power of capitalism at its purest.

From The Guardian, My Kind of Town,
D'Eramo seems to have spent the winter of 1992-3 in Lakeview (my old neighbourhood) and made some return trips since. A wide reading of primary and secondary sources supplements that direct experience, but this remains a European book about an American city. Chicago is a surprising, riddling and enraging object of contemplation. Sometimes D'Eramo lets himself be drawn: "The climate of hatred, oppression and segregation is so unbearable in the United States that you wonder why the Blacks don't revolt by staging an all-out rebellion." This is heartfelt, but useless. He is much better on the pompous little enclave of the University of Chicago, with its roster of Nobel laureates, its repro Oxbridge college buildings and its private police force to protect all this from the surrounding black neighbourhoods. His verdict on the laissez-faire economics of the U of C's so-called Chicago Boys is worth the price of the book alone: "Greed soaked in belief."


Boystown, an ethnography by Jason Orne




Drexel U. professor, Jason Orne wrote an ethnography of Chicago's Boystown neighborhood, called Boystown.












From the U of Chicago Press description,

Orne takes readers on a detailed, lively journey through Chicago’s Boystown, which serves as a model for gayborhoods around the country. The neighborhood, he argues, has become an entertainment district—a gay Disneyland—where people get lost in the magic of the night and where straight white women can “go on safari.” In their original form, though, gayborhoods like this one don’t celebrate differences; they create them. By fostering a space outside the mainstream, gay spaces allow people to develop an alternative culture—a queer culture that celebrates sex.
Orne spent three years doing fieldwork in Boystown, searching for ways to ask new questions about the connective power of sex and about what it means to be not just gay, but queer. The result is the striking Boystown, illustrated throughout with street photography by Dylan Stuckey. In the dark backrooms of raunchy clubs where bachelorettes wouldn’t dare tread, people are hooking up and forging “naked intimacy.” Orne is your tour guide to the real Boystown, then, where sex functions as a vital center and an antidote to assimilation.

You can read an excerpt at Goodreads here.

From Chicago Magazine, How Boystown became a Gay Disneyland.

From the Chicago Reader, Only Sex Can Save Boystown.

Useni Eugene Perkins's The Explosion of Chicago's Black Street Gangs



Useni Eugene Perkins is not a traditional academic, but his sociological work includes this detailed analysis of the rise of black street gangs in Chicago.

From the preface,
...as one who has worked with and observed Black street gangs for over twenty-five years, I believe I do have some insight about them. Furthermore, I believe as a Black social practitioner my insight gives a perspective on Black street gangs that has not been provided by many white academicians and social scientists. What this commentary attempts to do is to trace the evolution of Chicago's Black street gangs and identify those factors that have made many of them the violent gangs they are today. In doing so, I have tried to separate myth from fact and list critical realities we must face if we are to have a significant impact on Black street gangs. Although I do not provide solutions to the Black street gang problem, I believe some strategies for remedying the problem can be extrapolated from my commentary.

Here is Perkins's poem Hey Black Child.






Robert Sampson's The Great American City



Robert Sampson is a Harvard University sociology professor who wrote The Great American City; Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect

From the University of Chicago Press,
For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Great American City argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live.
To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade’s research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration. Even national crises cannot halt the impact of place, Sampson finds, as he analyzes the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftermath, bringing his magisterial study up to the fall of 2010.
Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century, Great American City is at once a landmark research project, a commanding argument for a new theory of social life, and the story of an iconic city.

Excerpt here:

Observing Chicago

“Chicago is the great American city.” – Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Enter contemporary and, yes, global Chicago. Logic demands that if neighborhoods do not matter and placelessness reigns, then the city is more or less a random swirl. Anyone (or anything) could be here just as easily as there. Identities and inequalities by place should be rapidly interchangeable, the durable inequality of a community rare, and neighborhood effects on both individuals and higher–level social processes should be weak or nonexistent. The effects of spatial proximity should also be weak. And so goes much contemporary scholarship

By contrast, the guiding thesis of this book is that differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen, but that it is has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction—and with effects that span a wide variety of social phenomena. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health, protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, mobility flows, collective efficacy, or immigration, to name a few subjects investigated in this book, the city is ordered by a spatial logic (“placed”) and yields differences as much today as a century ago. The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social, as described by Henry Zorbaugh in his classic treatise The Gold Coast and the Slum. Spatially inscribed social differences, I argue, constitute a family of “neighborhood effects” that are pervasive, strong, cross–cutting, and paradoxically stable even as they are changing in manifest form.

To get an initial feel for the social and physical manifestations of my thesis and the enduring significance of place, walk with me on down the streets of this iconic American city in the first decade of the twenty–first century. I begin the tour in the heart of phantasmagoria if there ever was one—the bustling “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue, the highly touted showcase of contemporary Chicago. As we start southward from the famed Water Tower, we see mostly glitter and a collage of well–to–do people, with whites predominant among the shoppers laden with bags from the likes of Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, and more. Pristine stores gleam, police officers direct traffic at virtually every intersection throughout the day, and construction cranes loom in the nearby distance erecting (or in anticipation of ) new condos. There is an almost complete lack of what James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously termed “broken windows,” a metaphor for neighborhood disrepair and urban neglect. As I walked south on a midmorning in January of 2006, street sweepers were cleaning both sides of an already clean street as if to make the point. Whatever “disorder” exists is in fact socially organized, whether the occasional homeless asking for money in approved locations (near the river is common; in front of Van Cleef & Arpels or the Disney Store is not) or groups with a cause pressing their case with pamphlets, signs, and petitions. A favorite blip around the holidays is charity appeals mixed with the occasional hurling of abuse (or ketchup) at shoppers emerging from the furrier. I see nothing on this day but many furs. Other warmer times of the year bring out a cornucopia of causes. On a warm day in late March of 2007, a homeless shelter for women presses its cause alongside an anti–Obama crusader (the latter getting many glares, in this, Obama country).

As we near the Chicago River, Donald Trump announces his vision. It is not subtle, of course, but rather a symbolic shout; in the city of skyscrapers the cranes here are busy erecting the self–described world’s tallest future building, one in which “residential units on the 89th floor will break a 37–year world record held by the John Hancock Center for the world’s highest homes off ground level.” Chicago is once again a “city on the make,” as Nelsen Algren put it well, and so it seems perfectly fitting that Trump chose Chicago for this particular behemoth. On a cold day in March with barely a hole in the ground, international tourists were busily snapping pictures of the spectacle to be. A year later at fifteen stories and rising, and then later at almost ninety, the shutters of the tourist cameras continued to flap. In April 2009, only the height had changed and Trump’s vision was complete. Here, status is in place.

After crossing the Chicago River from the Near North Side into the Loop and passing the clash of classic architecture and Trump’s monument to the future in its midst, one begins to see the outlines of the new Millennium Park in the distance, the half–billion–dollar extravaganza long championed by the second Mayor Daley and built considerably over cost with cries of corruption and cronyism. Yet there is no denying the visual impact and success of Millennium Park, a Disney–like playground, all shiny and new. Even on a cold winter day there is public activity and excitement in the air. People mill about, skaters glide across the rink, and film–projected faces of average citizens stare out of the fountain’s facade. Looking west from the park the skyline and bustle of the Loop stand out in a different way than the Near North—more workers and everyday business activity against the backdrop of landmark buildings and institutions.

Continuing south along Michigan Avenue past Roosevelt Road one sees more action, but with a twist. The architecture and historical pulse of the southern part of Chicago has always been different from points north. Despite its proximity to the Loop, the community of the “Near South Side” was marked by vacant rail yards, vagrants, dilapidated SRO (single–room–occupancy) hotels frequented by transients, penny arcades, and warehouses. The latter are now being redeveloped for lofts and one old SRO building after another is being swept away for new condos and chic restaurants. Unlike the cumulative advantages being piled high atop the long–stable Gold Coast, renewal is the order of the day. Alongside and in some cases atop former railroad yards, the Near South development rose to prominence in the mid–1990s when Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife moved there from the storied political neighborhood of Bridgeport in 1994. Other developments soon took off and today flux is readily apparent where decay once stood. Few Chicagoans just ten years ago would have imagined eating smartly at South Wabash and 21st, the former haunts of hobos and the homeless. Whereas the Magnificent Mile has long anchored development and moneyed investment, the Near South Side tells a story of real change.

Further down Michigan Avenue between about 35th and 47th Streets in the communities of Douglas and then Grand Boulevard, the scene is jarringly different. The transformation of the Near South has given way to what sociologists traditionally called the “slum.”In a walk down Michigan Avenue in 2006 I saw what appeared to be a collapsing housing project to the left, broken glass in the street, vacant and boarded–up buildings, and virtually no people. Those I observed were walking quickly with furtive glances. On my walk in 2006 and again in early 2007, no whites were to be found and no glimmering city parks were within sight. The cars were beat up and there was little sign of collective gatherings or public activity, save perhaps what appeared to be a drug deal that transacted quickly. Yet even here there were stirrings of change, symbolized most dramatically by vacant lots to the west of where there once stood hulking and decaying projects built expressly to contain the city’s black poor.

In fact, the South Side of Chicago once housed the most infamous slum in America. Chicago showed it knew how to build not just skyscrapers but spectacular high–rises for the poor; the Robert Taylor Homes alone once held over twenty–five thousand residents–black, poor and isolated, outdoing Cabrini Green, another national symbol of urban despair. As described by the Chicago Housing Authority itself, Robert Taylor apartments were “arrayed in a linear series of 28 16–story high–rises, which formed a kind of concrete curtain for traffic passing by on the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway.” The wider neighborhood of the projects—“Bronzeville,” as it was named by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton in Black Metropolis—became infamous as one of the most dangerous and dispossessed in the country in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet in a short ten–year span the Robert Taylor Homes have been demolished (literally, blown up with dynamite) and former residents scattered throughout the metropolitan area. The tragic mistake of designed segregation became too much for even the Chicago City Council to ignore. Officially recognized as a failed policy, the last building of Robert Taylor was closed at the end of 2006.

I visited the area in March 2007 after the last building was destroyed. It was eerily quiet as I paused to contemplate and observe vast open spaces where grinding poverty once reigned amid families making the best they could out of an unforgiving environment. An especially haunting reflection came to mind, a visit in 1992 to the Robert Taylor Homes in the same exact block. Passing inoperable metal detectors and walking up urine–stenched stairs because the elevators were broken, the physical signs of degradation were overwhelming. Yet a group of us entered an apartment that was immaculate, where we met two single mothers who told a story of survival and determination to see a better day. Both of their sons had been murdered and they had knitted a quilt with one–foot by one–foot squares honoring every other child who had also been murdered in the projects. The unfurled quilt extended nearly the length of the room. Shaken, I remember thinking at the time that surely anything would be an improvement over the prisonlike towers. On this spot one sees almost a verdant green expanse, with downtown far in the distance (fig. 1.1). The “problem” is now out of sight and for many, including city leaders, out of mind.

Heading slightly east and progressing toward the lake, one sees the emergence of a thriving black middle class amid the rubble and vacant lots adjacent to the former projects. Hard as it might be to imagine, $500,000 homes are being erected next to boarded–up buildings at the center of what was a low–rise slum just years earlier. Riders arriving by train into Chicago between the 1960s and the recent past would witness concentrated poverty up close—abandoned buildings and all the signs of decline appeared to the west of the tracks on the South Side in the small community of Oakland, which sits just north and east of Grand Boulevard. Nearby at the corner of Pershing and Langley, new homeowners are beckoned by a sign for the “Arches at Oakwood Shores”—a country club –like name where prostitutes once roamed freely and physical destruction was rampant. Vacant lots serve as reminders of the transition still in progress. At Drexel and 43rd on a day in March of 2007, a group of homeless men sit around a fire on a trash–strewn lot. At 47th and Wabash sits a huge boarded–up building, menacing in feel. Although still a work in progress, the areas in Oakland and around parts of Bronzeville represent one of the most stunning turnarounds in urban America today. How and why this happened takes on significance considering that most slums in Chicago, as shown in chapter 5, remain slums.

 

figure 1.1. In the former shadows of the projects: where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. Photo by the author, September 13, 2007.

 

figure 1.1. In the former shadows of the projects: where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. Photo by the author, September 13, 2007.

Soon after heading south from this surreal transformation to the likely “Black Gold Coast” of the future, one finds stately mansions in Kenwood and then the integrated and stable community of Hyde Park, home to passionate intellectuals and a dense organizational life. Adopted home and inspiration to President Barack Obama and other movers and shakers, almost nothing happens in Hyde Park without community input and institutional connections, visible in signs, churches, bookstores, petitions, and a wide variety of community organizations. People instantly know what you mean when you say you live in Hyde Park; the name swims in cultural meaning. It was no accident that Obama was a “community organizer,” as chapter 8 explains.

Just west of Hyde Park, however, stark differences appear again. Across Washington Park sits a community of the same name that has seen hard times and still struggles mightily. Along the major thoroughfare of Garfield Boulevard stand burned buildings, gated liquor stores, and empty lots. At the corner of Michigan Avenue, we could not find a more apt portrayal of the second part of Zorbaugh’s contrast. The inverse of Michigan Avenue north of the Loop, here we find dead spaces permeated by a sense of dread. At midday, groups of men hang out, bleary eyed and without apparent purpose. As we head further south into Woodlawn we see block after block of what most Americans would consider the classic ghetto. Black, visibly poor, and characterized by physical disrepair, west Woodlawn looks bleak to the eye. Zorbaugh might not have imagined the Black Gold Coast and the Slum, but today it is apparently here.

Continuing the patchwork quilt, if we head eastward to the area south of the University of Chicago, renewal announces itself once again. First one witnesses a stretch of open land where tenements once stood. Then east of the elevated tracks and former strip of decay on 63rd Street, new homes start sprouting. Around 63rd and Kimbark it looks almost like a suburb with back decks, grills, and lawns on display. On Kenwood Avenue, just south of 63rd, sit more new homes in a row. Tidy and neat, the middle class is moving in to reclaim the slums.

Heading further south to Avalon Park and Chatham we find the neighborhoods where a stable black middle class has existed for decades. Along street after street south of 79th and west of Stony Island one can see neat brick buildings, myriad neighborhood associations, and children playing happily in the streets. No new developments, no dramatic changes, and little media glare like that chronicling the disrepute of the slums. For years and like many neighborhoods across the U.S., this area has seen families raising their kids, tending to their homes, and going about quietly living the American Dream. At almost every block a sign announces a block club and shared expectations for conduct.

If we head west past the Dan Ryan Expressway we find more stability, albeit an impoverished one. Here we confront concentrated poverty stretching for hundreds of blocks. Outsiders are often surprised at how far one may drive in certain areas of Chicago’s South Side and see marked signs of deterioration. Stability of change thus rules again, where neighborhoods maintain their relative positions in the overall hierarchy. Why these neighborhoods and not the ones like Oakland?

And so it goes as one continues on through the highly variegated mosaic of twenty–first–century Chicago—or Boston, New York, Los Angeles, or any other American city. Venturing down the streets of our cities, the careful observer sees what appear to be “day and night” representations of community life. There are vast disparities in the contemporary city on a number of dimensions that are anything but randomly distributed in space. Perhaps more important, the meanings that people attribute to these places and differences are salient and often highly consensual. Our walk also reveals that important as was Zorbaugh’s work, the Gold Coast and the slum is not the only contrast. No matter which direction one turns in Chicago, the result will be to encounter additional social worlds—perhaps the teeming immigrant enclave of Little Village, bohemian Wicker Park, white working–class Clearing, yuppified Lincoln Park, the upper–class white community of Norwood, the incredibly diverse Uptown, or the land that time forgot, Hegewisch.

Thus while some things remain the same from Zorbaugh’s day, other things have changed. The intersection of West Oak and North Cambridge in the west part of the Near North Side was considered “Death Corner” in the 1920s by Zorbaugh. That maintained for decades and the area around the infamous Cabrini Green homes was still dicey on multiple visits in the decade of the 2000s, a swelter of contradictions. Decay was present in many blocks with a large number of boarded–up buildings near Oak and Hudson. On Locust near Orleans it was common until recently to see high–rise projects with unemployed men hanging out during the day. Yet the Cabrini Green projects are in the process of being razed to be replaced by low–rise, hopefully mixed–income housing. The area sends mixed messages and its future is one to watch, however painfully. On a brisk day in March of 2007 I witnessed a clearly emaciated and drug–addled woman begging for money a short stroll from Cabrini units near a large sign announcing new condos and a gym on North Larrabee St. with the unsubtle proclamation: “Look Better Naked.” I revisit Death Corner in 2010 in the final chapter.

For now it is clear that Chicago possesses neighborhoods of nearly every ilk—from the seemingly endless bungalow belt of working–class homes to the skyscrapers of the Loop, the diversity and disparities of Chicago are played out against a vast kaleidoscope of contrasts. Indeed, The Gold Coast(s) and the slum(s)—and everything in between represent a mosaic of contrasts that reflect the twenty–first–century city and its diversity of interrelated parts.




Robert Vargas's Wounded City




University of Chicago professor, Robert Vargas published Wounded City, an ethnography of Chicago's Little Village neighborhood and the gang turf wars there.


From Goodreads,

In 2009, Chicago spent millions of dollars to create programs to prevent gang violence in some of its most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Yet in spite of the programs, violence has grown worse in some of the very neighborhoods that the violence prevention programs were intented to help. While public officials and social scientists often attribute the violence - and the failure of the programs - to a lack of community in poor neighborhoods, closer study reveals another source of community division: local politics. 
Through an ethnographic case study of Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, Wounded City dispells the popular belief that a lack of community is the primary source of violence, arguing that competition for political power and state resources often undermine efforts to reduce gang violence. Robert Vargas argues that the state, through the way it governs, can contribute to distrust and division among community members, thereby undermining social cohesion. The strategic actions taken by police officers, politicians, nonprofit organizations, and gangs to collaborate or compete for power and resources can vary block by block, triggering violence on some blocks while successfully preventing it on others.
A rich blend of urban politics, sociology, and criminology, Wounded City offers a cautionary tale for elected officials, state agencies, and community based organizations involved with poor neighborhoods.


This is a good website for a walking tour of Little Village. 



The most trending sociology papers of 2019

The top 50 papers (out of 29663 papers) published in 2019 in the category ‘Sociology':
https://ooir.org/trend.php?category=sociology&year=2019


American Project, an Ethnography by Sudhir Venkatesh




This 2002 ethnography was published by Harvard University Press,
High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the “projects” soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex.
Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants’ thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.
American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants’ political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

Read a preview from Goodreads.

Mitchell Duneier's, Ethnography Slim's Table



Mitchell Duneier from Princeton's sociology department spent 4 years as an ethnographic observer at the Valois Cafeteria in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.  His work became a 1994 book called Slim's Table.





From the U of Chicago Press
At the Valois "See Your Food" cafeteria on Chicago’s South Side, black and white men gather over cups of coffee and steam-table food. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist, spent four years at the Valois writing this moving profile of the black men who congregate at "Slim’s Table." Praised as "a marvelous study of those who should not be forgotten" by the Wall Street Journal,Slim’s Table helps demolish the narrow sociological picture of black men and simple media-reinforced stereotypes. In between is a "respectable" citizenry, too often ignored and little understood.


From the NIU Library reviews, Slim's Table Destroys Black Male Stereotypes by Rosalind Morgan.
Despite its general similarities to these previous sociological studies, Slim's Table departs from tradition in both its focus and its conclusions. Duneier concentrates on a category within the black population which has received little attention — aging working-class males. He argues that they constitute a caring community whose moral values contradict popular stereotypes about contemporary African-American society.
 Duneier bases his conclusions on intensive observation of the regular customers at Valois, a cafeteria located in Hyde Park, which is bordered on three sides by the largest contiguous African-American community in Chicago and on the fourth side by Lake Michigan. Valois' patrons include blacks from Hyde Park and adjacent neighborhoods as well as lesser numbers of whites from Hyde Park and students from the University of Chicago.
The title of the book refers to the table at the cafeteria which for more than a decade served as a daily meeting place for a core group of black men. Among these regulars are Jackson, a retired crane operator and longshoreman; Harold, a self-employed exterminator; Cornelius, a retired meter inspector; Ted, a film developer for Playboy; and Earl, an administrator with the Chicago Board of Education. Duneier provides character sketches of these patrons, but their interactions with Slim, a local mechanic, and his relationship with other regulars — white as well as black — form the center of the study.
From the LA Times bookreview,
This is only part of the message of Mitchell Duneier’s “Slim’s Table.” This wonderfully thoughtful book also is a documentary about a loose-knit group of older, working-class black bachelors who spend a significant amount of their time in each other’s company at a restaurant called Valois near the University of Chicago. These men are given voice in Duneier’s book in a setting that is alien to most middle-class Americans. The finest moments of this lucid book are when Duneier allows the men at Slim’s table to speak for themselves. You hear opinions on the state of morality in their world. You get to know these men and understand them in a way that no newspaper article or television special could encompass. You might even be drawn to the society of Valois at Slim’s table.

Working Class Heroes




Chicago's Southwest Side

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520235434/working-class-heroes

Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.

Unequal City by Carla Shedd





Unequal City by Carla Shedd, a sociology professor at Columbia University
Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.
Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.
Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.

Compliments of Chicagohoodz





Compliments of Chicagohoodz is not a sociology book per se, but it details the history and meanings of Chicago Street Gang art.  It might be a useful source to examine Chicago deviant subculture.

Here's a conversation with the authors, Jinx and Mr C.