Policing the Project: Crime, Carcerality, and Chicago Public Housing

Drawing on both ethnographic and archival research on Chicago’s public housing, this paper explores how Chicago’s public housing was policed over the course of the twentieth century and analyzes the effects of this policing on the social, political, and spatial trajectories of the city’s public housing developments. It argues that policing was not a neutral response to crime but rather a transformative practice that shaped the daily lives of public housing residents, rendered their domestic spaces more carceral, and tightened the formal and institutional links between public housing and the prison. In doing so, policing also lay the groundwork for large-scale landscape change, including the demolition and privatization of the city’s public housing in the twenty-first century.