In the Shadow of Jane Addams

About the Book

The neighborhood around Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side was a laboratory for the settlement movement and reformers dedicated to improving working-class neighborhoods. Ann Durkin Keating and Rima Lunin Schultz explore the Near West Side neighborhood through ideas to improve, maintain, and remake it.

The authors focus on five plans proposed between 1889 and 1961 by Hull-House, the US government, the Chicago Plan Commission, residents, and finally the 1961 University of Illinois plan that destroyed the existing neighborhood. Proposals often expected residents to leave while eliminating the diversity of people, industries, and businesses in favor of the homogeneity favored by the middle and upper classes. At the same time, other plans tried but failed to improve the Near West Side’s inadequate housing, environmental conditions, and poor access to social services. Keating and Schultz also show how the definition of urban planning changed over time and how it impacted ideas for the neighborhood.

Detailed and perceptive, In the Shadow of Jane Addams explores how power, policy, and local voices shaped urban neighborhoods in Chicago and across the United States.