ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to investigate the specific practices through which public space is produced in mixed-income neighbourhoods and how the power to determine its use is arrayed. It offers an ethnographic inroad into one of the newly constructed public spaces and the surrounding streetscape in Chicago's Oakland neighbourhood. In the twenty-first century, a consensus has emerged in the housing policy arena that mixed-income neighbourhoods are desirable. Among the most committed to the adoption of mixed-income policies in the United States, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has demolished more than 50 traditional high-rise structures since 2000 to make way for mixed-income housing developments in gentrifying areas of the city. In the early 1950s, Olander Homes, a 15-storey federal aid housing project was constructed on a parcel of slum land. Open space first entered the redevelopment discourse at the Lakefront Properties in a 1999 Request for Proposals for mixed-income redevelopment issued by the CHA.
