ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the area around Maxwell Street, Chicago, as a rich urban place. Maxwell Street was the site of the largest open-air market in North America during much of the 20th century. It was also a place of constant population change and a remarkable diversity of ethnicities. Louis Wirth’s classic text The Ghetto was based on this area. The chapter considers the site as a place where value is negotiated. This is obviously the case in a flea market, where haggling takes place over the value of bargains. Maxwell Street was a site where objects were constantly revalued. But other kinds of valuation were also happening through how the landscape itself was progressively devalued (and demolished) and then revalued through the novel process of financialisation known as tax increment financing (TIF). This chapter will bring together narratives normally held apart – stories from cultural geography and economic geography – to show how Maxwell Street was expelled from and enrolled in various regimes of value. The chapter draws on extensive archival research and on literature (novels), planning documents and photographs.
