Cabrini Green

Every time I thought or even heard of, for that matter, about Cabrini Green it was always negative things; how dangerous or ghetto it was. I heard about the type of people that resided in that area and how much crime took place. In fact a lot of students from that area used to be sent to my high school because of problems or issues they were having. So when I first heard that they were tearing down the old Cabrini to make it nicer, my VERY first thought was, where are the people/families going to go while this building is taking place? And secondly, are they going to build the same amount of places to fit the amount of people that lived there originally? While I agree that Cabrini Green needed some help, I believe this did no good for the actual residents of that area except practically force them out of their homes to start the same kind of life in some other part of the city. Did this actually help our city out? Do the people that actually reside in close proximity to Cabrini Green actually feel safer with the news homes built? It would be interesting to actually be able to talk to people to get a feel of what their attitudes are about it.

After some of the readings, I began to see that a lot of leaders/planners of the city, including back to Burnham, are more worried about the appearance and the actual land itself, whether its making profit or at least looking semi decent, than the actually residents of Chicago themselves. We have been learning about the production of space in our Chicago Term class, and the rebuilding of Cabrini Green and the things around it made me think of what I have learned about the city as a whole. It is all about commerce and profit. They didn’t do this for the people, so they could live better lives but instead of the appearance and money.

As much as I enjoyed the opportunity of being able to have a tour led by the city/urban planner himself, some of the impersonal comments he made frustrated me. I did take into account that he is not PERSONALLY responsible for the displacement and homelessness of all the people from the old Cabrini Green but his lack of sympathy or compassion made it hard to accept the facts of it. The idea to rip down the old Cabrini Green to build and renovate a new Cabrini Green sounded like the city actually cared that, that part of the city was run down and not looked as comfortable place to be, so I thought they were actually going to do something about it!