This essay argues that Chicago’s exceptional status in American history stems from both its urban history and civic mythology. It explores how Chicago is an important case study for examining intertwined histories of labor, urban geography, and social reform and identifies opportunities for scholars to better integrate gender, age, and sexuality in the study of Chicago’s cultural landscape. This essay questions celebratory narratives of Chicago’s progressive reform movement by highlighting how the prohibitionist impulse of many urban reformers created political contradictions in the modern state.
In early March 2025, as we were working on the program for our Los Angeles conference that October, Kenneth T. Jackson contacted the conference committee to suggest a special session: a retrospective of the Urban History Association (UHA). He proposed that since we had hosted such a session nearly ten years earlier at the 2016 conference in Chicago, it was the right time to take another look back and formally assess how the association had developed in the intervening decade. The program committee was enthusiastic about the prospect, and so with their approval I contacted some of the UHA’s former presidents and executive directors to ask if they would be interested in participating; they were similarly enthusiastic, and within a week’s time the panel had been formed. When the session convened in Los Angeles, the participants and audience told origin stories, raised important issues, and marked key milestones.
During the early 1990s Philadelphia police officers and Philadelphia Inquirer reporters dubbed the Black and Latine neighborhoods of North Philadelphia the “Badlands.” This geologic term evoked landscapes in the American West to convey the deleterious impact of deindustrialization and the rise of the drug trade on these neighborhoods. I argue that this discourse obscured the social, political, and economic transformations these neighborhoods experienced due to postwar deindustrialization and disinvestment, the national right-wing rollback of public services and social entitlements, and carceral state expansion. Police and public officials saw the “Badlands” as neighborhoods that had fallen into moral disrepute, and that cried out in need of moral correction. As a representation of these transformations, the Badlands discourse shifted explanatory power from economic and policy choices to the ostensible moral shortcomings of those who embraced the illicit drug trade. It did so in part by invoking the moral grammar of the western frontier. Like frontier mythology, the Badlands discourse was, I argue, a declensionist script that naturalized and racialized the problem of neighborhood decline by locating it within the landscape itself. The Badlands discourse also shaped how municipal officials approached the improvement of North Philadelphia neighborhoods; the solutions that officials pursued followed from how this discourse framed the problems. Too often, improvement meant demolition, as when the city demolished several entire blocks of rowhouses where drug users sought shelter from the streets. I argue that these demolitions exacerbated long-term processes of disinvestment by expanding the punitive terrain of policing and incarceration.
