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.

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.