Designing a Chinatown anti-displacement map and walking tour with communication asset mapping

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates a design activism project that led to a co-designed ‘anti-displacement map’ and ‘walking tour’ in Chicago’s Chinatown. The work argues that one way to deploy urban design projects that consider the fears of displacement in gentrifying neighbourhoods is to integrate what aspects of the neighbourhood existing community actors value and promote advocacy for a future that these participants envision. The project accomplished these goals through ‘communication asset mapping’, an application centring on communicative spaces that are of value to existing communities and help to create the capacity for positive social change in the built environment.

Acknowledgments

The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not represent official views of the funders. Thank you to Debbie Liu, Ken Li, Thuong Phan, Hanlin Guo, Michael Limón, Jamason Chen, Kathleen Yang-Clayton, Brandon Lee, Steve Moon, and the author’s Designing Media for Social Change course students from Spring 2017 for their collaboration in this university–community project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Ecker (2019); Hung (2017); Nasser (2019); Semuels (2019); Zahniser (2019).

2. Chicago ‘Community Areas’ are 77 divisions of the city created by University of Chicago demographers back in the 1920’s. City Hall adopted them as the official community boundaries and uses them for much of the city government’s formal statistics. Community Areas can include multiple designated neighbourhoods such as Chinatown. The Gentrification Index produced by the Voorhees Centre at UIC Chicago was initiated to help community-based advocacy organizations identify development trends and to provide data to fight the loss of primarily residents of colour in neighbourhoods facing potential displacement (Betancur and Smith 2016, 39).

3. For more information on Chicago Chinatown’s current demographics, see Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (2013). For Chicago Chinatown’s history, see Kiang (1992) and Ling (2012).

4. Bronzeville, Pilsen and Bridgeport are historically working-class neighbourhoods of colour that are also struggling against the threats of gentrification and displacement.

5. Information on this coalition’s week of action and its press release can be accessed on: https://www.facebook.com/events/444350543023412/.

6. The partnership published a community research report that details more findings from the focus groups and policy recommendations (see Villanueva and Liu 2017).

7. See Abello (2017) and Greenfield (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Midwest Asian American Community Research Grant from Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago and Kellogg Foundation.