As part of a Crain’s Chicago Business series covering the various issues facing Chicago, Teresa Córdova, director of the Great Cities Institute, writes that the city’s strategy to address gun violence needs to adapt to the changing nature of gangs, which operate more as fragmented cliques rarely connected to one another in the wake of shuttered public housing and schools.
To understand violence in Chicago, we must first understand the contexts in which it occurs. The complexities we then see point to the need for more nuanced approaches that go beyond attributing the violence to any single factor or set of actors. The significance of context cannot be overstated.
