Conclusion: Redevelopment Along the Frontier

Abstract

Chicago’s Redevelopment Reality Along the Frontier reflects on, first, that there is an unrecognized, current kind of redevelopment machine in Chicago and perhaps in America: a “tyrannizing fear machine.” Its actors, I suggest, are amazingly adroit in working through two dominant things, creations of race and fear, to “terror-redevelop” along the new redevelopment frontier. These fears in current Chicago, I suggest, take the form of what David Bissell (2013) terms emotive-stinging disruptions of settled ordinariness. The chapter reflects on the issue that, second, a kind of race-class politics currently exists in these clubs which make the drive to commodify them unclear in impact. A prototypical South Side club, Beebe’s, is discussed as rife with contestation to the commodification that embeds in a “leisure as resistance social formation” further exploding the myth of simple interpreting black subjects in communities gripped by “American apartheid.”