Chicago, the South Side Planning Board, and the Search for (Further) Order

This essay uses the history of the South Side Planning Board (SSPB)—an organization committed to battling urban blight in Chicago—to show how urban renewal backers used the concepts of social organization and disorganization to speak to the perceived blight that marred the city’s African American neighborhoods, to bolster the legitimacy of large-scale urban renewal programs meant to address such conditions, and to inform the architectural and planning vision undergirding these programs. However, the SSPB and its allies stripped these ideas of any nuance, drawing from earlier sociological understandings of urban disorganization to posit that individual behavior, rather than structural realities, created disordered cities.