Chicago's Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs

This book examines the conflict surrounding the latest redevelopment frontier in Chicago: the city's South Side blues clubs and blocks. Like Chicago, cities such as Cleveland, St. Louis, Boston, Washington D.C., Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia are experiencing a new redevelopment machine: one of tyrannizing and fear. Its actors are adroit at working via the creation of fear to 'terror-redevelop' in these historically neglected neighborhoods. The book also discusses the powerful race and class-based politics in Chicago's blues clubs that resist such change. A 'leisure as resistance' framework represents the latest innovative form of opposition to the transformation of these historic sites.

David Wilson is Professor of Geography, Urban Planning, African American Studies, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.