In this new volume, Michael A. Pagano curates essays focusing on the neighborhood's role in urban policy solutions. The papers emerged from dynamic discussions among policy makers, researchers, public intellectuals, and citizens at the 2014 UIC Urban Forum. As the writers show, the greater the city, the more important its neighborhoods and their distinctions. The topics focus on sustainable capital and societal investments in people and firms at the neighborhood level. Proposed solutions cover a range of possibilities for enhancing the quality of life for individuals, households, and neighborhoods. These include everything from microenterprises to factories; from social spaces for collective and social action to private facilities; from affordable housing and safety to gated communities; and from neighborhood public education to cooperative, charter, and private schools. Contributors: Andy Clarno, Teresa Cordova, Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Pedro A. Noguera, Alice O'Connor, Mary Pattillo, Janet Smith, Nik Theodore, Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, Stephanie Truchan, and Rachel Weber.

During the 1960s and 70s, Chicago was shaped by art and ideas produced and circulated on its South Side. Defined by the city’s social, political, and geographic divides and by the energies of its multiple overlapping art scenes, this vibrant moment of creative expression produced a cultural legacy whose impact continues to unfold nationally and internationally. The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, published in tandem with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, examines this cultural moment—brimming with change and conflict—and the figures who defined it. Focusing primarily on African American artists in and out of the Black Arts Movement, The Time is Now! re-examines watershed cultural moments: from the Wall of Respect to Black Creativity, from the Civil Rights Movement to AfriCOBRA, from vivid protest posters to visionary Afrofuturist art, and from the Hairy Who to the radical sounds of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Employing new scholarship that reassesses and recalibrates traditional narratives of postwar Chicago art, the exhibit resonates with current national dialogues around race, gender, protest, and belonging. The book contains a series of long and short essays, interviews, and other contextual material, along with full-color images of all works included in the exhibition and extensive reproductions of ephemera and historical photographs

First published in 1999, Mary Pattillo's "Black Picket Fences "explores an American demographic group too often ignored by both scholars and the media: the black middle class. Nearly fifteen years later, this book remains a groundbreaking study of a group still underrepresented in the academic and public spheres. The result of living for three years in "Groveland," a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, "Black Picket Fences" explored both the advantages the black middle class has and the boundaries they still face. Despite arguments that race no longer matters, Pattillo showed a different reality, one where black and white middle classes remain separate and unequal.
Stark, moving, and still timely, the book is updated for this edition with a new epilogue by the author that details how the neighborhood and its residents fared in the recession of 2008, as well as new interviews with many of the same neighborhood residents featured in the original. Also included is a new foreword by acclaimed University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau.

Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s. Its findings offer a comprehensive analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. It offers a dizzying and dynamic world filled with captivating people and startling revelations. A new foreword from sociologist Mary Pattillo places the study in modern context, updating the story with the current state of black communities in Chicago and the larger United States and exploring what this means for the future. As the country continues to struggle with race and our treatment of black lives, Black Metropolis continues to be a powerful contribution to the conversation.

In "Black on the Block," Mary Pattillo--a "Newsweek "Woman of the 21st Century--uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.
There was a time when North Kenwood-Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. "Black on the Block" tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously "black" neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood-Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. "A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one."--"Chicago"" Reader"
"To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's" Black on the Block,""--"Boston""Globe"

In this new volume, Michael A. Pagano curates essays focusing on the neighborhood's role in urban policy solutions. The papers emerged from dynamic discussions among policy makers, researchers, public intellectuals, and citizens at the 2014 UIC Urban Forum. As the writers show, the greater the city, the more important its neighborhoods and their distinctions. The topics focus on sustainable capital and societal investments in people and firms at the neighborhood level. Proposed solutions cover a range of possibilities for enhancing the quality of life for individuals, households, and neighborhoods. These include everything from microenterprises to factories; from social spaces for collective and social action to private facilities; from affordable housing and safety to gated communities; and from neighborhood public education to cooperative, charter, and private schools. Contributors: Andy Clarno, Teresa Cordova, Nilda Flores-Gonzalez, Pedro A. Noguera, Alice O'Connor, Mary Pattillo, Janet Smith, Nik Theodore, Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, Stephanie Truchan, and Rachel Weber.