Tag Archives: City Spotlight

City Spotlight Chicago: Don’t Go

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Cover photo credit: Tonika Lewis Johnson; Cover design: David A. Gee
Images and excerpts reprinted with permission from Polity Press.

Maria Krysan, University of Illinois Chicago

Have you ever been told “Don’t Go” to Chicago’s south or west sides? And/or that they are dangerous? 

I have.

I moved to Chicago in 2000 to take an assistant professor job at the University of Illinois Chicago. It was the tightest rental market in recent memory, so rentals were expensive and hard to find, and I only had a weekend. After a failed attempt to find an apartment in the city, I went to the only logical next place if you are a student of residential segregation: Oak Park, a village on the western border of Chicago, famous among sociologists for its intentional pursuit of an integrated community in the midst of a notoriously segregated city (see The Oak Park Strategy by Carole Goodwin for an early history).

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