Sub-Urban Planning

Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes--once the nation's largest public housing project--is currently being dismantled. Half of its buildings have already been torn down, and of those that are still standing only some are occupied. It is only a matter of time before the remainder will meet the wrecking ball.

Completed in 1962, the Robert Taylor Homes at one time housed more than 27,000 residents, all African-Americans, in twenty-eight identical sixteen-story buildings. While the housing project replaced one of Chicago's worst slums, it became itself the stuff of legend--one of the nation's most infamous and troubled housing communities. It is being demolished in response to federal pressure on the grounds that the projects are no longer habitable.

Sudhir Venkatesh's new book, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto, is both an ethnography and a history of the Taylor Homes from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. Venkatesh spent a year and a half hanging out, as he puts it, primarily with longtime tenant leaders and gang members. The result is a fascinating study of community dynamics between various groups of tenants, including leaders and members of the Black Kings gang, and how they created and lived what Venkatesh refers to as an "ordered environment"--against incredible odds.

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