Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago

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Description

In 1995 a half-vacant public housing project on Chicago's Near West Side fell to the wrecking ball. The demolition and reconstruction of the Henry Horner housing complex ushered in the most ambitious urban housing experiment of its kind: smaller, mixed-income, and partially privatized developments that, the thinking went, would mitigate the insecur

Reviews

"Using the case of publicly subsidized housing and its residents in Chicago, Catherine Fennell brilliantly traces the architectures of public housing decay and the so-called solutions to them as affective possibilities. Political debates over how to house the urban poor unfold as gripping ethnographic realities here, urging us to think through the materiality of sympathy."Vincanne Adams, University of California, San Francisco

"This book is a must-read for those concerned with public housing and its aftermath. The author has captured stories rarely heard anywhere else."Planning Magazine

"An excellent, timely, and nuance ethnography that moves beyond the more familiar analysis of postwelfare urban inequalities. It is a valuable addition to the literature about urban poverty, urban planning, and the politics of race and class in the contemporary United States."American Anthropologist

"Fennells great achievement rests on her ability to capture those critiques of the new housing not as a nostalgia for the oldthat kind of thing is the preserve of the social scientists and the museum-advocates in her narrativebut rather as a negotiation of the difference between sympathetic attachments and abstract, sentimentalized obligations to anonymous others."Somatosphere

"Last Project Standing will undoubtedly make a great impact on the ways that other urban anthropologists respond to the influences of interdisciplinary humanistic research methods."Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Author Bio

Catherine Fennell is assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University.