Author
Matthew D. Wilson
mwilso25@uic.edu
Abstract
Chicago community area map and graphs and data tables for Chicago, Illinois, and the U.S. of Hispanic or Latino population data from the 2020 Census and Aggregate Household Income and Specific Origin from the 2019 American Community Survey. Produced for the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance.
Full Text for Population Data (PDF) »
Full Text for Fact Sheet on Latino Community in Illinois (PDF) »
(Image Source: Craig Kohlruss, The Sacramento Bee)
In an article from the Sacramento Bee and published by other California-based news outlets, Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development at UIC and senior research specialist with the Great Cities Institute at UIC, addresses the role of pay and working conditions leading to unionization efforts at some warehouses across the country, including at a Dollar General warehouse in the Sacramento area.
The plummeting unionization rate has also come with deteriorating pay and working conditions, said Beth Gutelius, the research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago who authored the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center’s study on the logistics industry.
“The warehousing industry… has largely been invisible to the public for its entire existence. No one thought of warehouse workers,” she said. “I think the pandemic brought those workers out into the limelight. That matters for the workers themselves but also for the support for the unionization effort.”
Adjusting for inflation, wages in the warehousing industry are lower than they were in 1990, Gutelius said.
“In many cases, it’s very physical work so people are questioning am I getting paid the amount (commensurate with) all the physical tolls?” she said.
(Video Credit: WTTW News)
Kathleen Yang-Clayton, UIC clinical associate professor of public administration and research associate with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, joined WTTW-TV’s “Chicago Tonight” for a segment on the Chicago City Council’s remap process and Asian American political representation in the city.
Kathleen Yang-Clayton, UIC clinical associate professor and research associate with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, says greater political representation is also important at a time when Asian Americans are facing a spike in racism and violence.
“We should think more broadly (about) how everyone is impacted by the lack of transparency, the gaming of these ward boundaries. There are solutions that would benefit the Asian American community as well as other communities,” Yang-Clayton.
(Photo Credit: Colin Boyle, Block Club Chicago)
A Block Club Chicago article on participatory budgeting taking place in Chicago’s 1st ward cites an online portal run by UIC’s Great Cities Institute that gives residents the opportunity to vote on potential projects.
Residents of the 1st Ward have until Dec. 3 to vote on how $1 million should be spent across the area. Residents can vote on 11 potential projects through an online portal run by the University of Illinois Chicago.
A Chicago Architecture Biennial Partner Program
Beyond questions of expression, we ask ourselves: how does this place make us feel? What do we see and hear, how does it dialogue with our memories?
For Coldefy, Architecture shapes our life and should be created for all of our senses.
Based in France and working with an international team, Coldefy “creates balanced environmental, urban and social compositions that push the boundaries of cities and life,” weaving landscape and personal narratives in projects such as the National Pulse Memorial & Museum in Orlando.
Coldefy, The Exhibition opens on November 11 and closes on December 18. Admission is free and you can visit during our business hours: Monday to Friday 9 am to 5 pm, Saturdays 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Closed on Sundays.
Join us on November 11 at 6:30 p.m. for a special opening night for the Coldefy exhibition and their architecture, including a panel moderated by Teresa Cordova, from the Great Cities Institute at UIC, about issues of sensorial and memorial architecture. Featuring Thomas Coldefy and Zoltán Neville; Michael Strautmanis from the Obama Foundation project; and Lesley Roth from the Clayco Group.
Followed by a wine and cheese reception.
This program is possible thanks to the support of Coldefy and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the US.
Coldefy brings a new type of pragmatism through its projects. Convinced that buildings influence our behavior, just as they shape our cities, Coldefy bases its work on social and sensory experience at the very core of and beyond the matters of aesthetics. Practicing sensitive architecture that is connected to nature and open to the landscape, Coldefy envisions buildings as a desire for tranquility and as opportunities to escape a frenzied pace of living.
Projects by Coldefy leave ample interstitial space, which facilitates a free flow and encourages encounters. They place themselves at the borderline between nature – through the context in which they are based – and personal narratives. These buildings thus reflect the life of their inhabitants and users, becoming spaces for living and communicating. Each Coldefy project leans on three fundamental values: urbanity, clarity and phenomenology. –Coldefy
The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) is dedicated to creating an international forum on architecture and urbanism. It produces year-round programs and a biennial exposition of city-wide activations for a diverse audience of designers, educators, advocates, and students. CAB’s mission is to engage and inspire professional and public audiences, highlight the transformative power of architecture and envision a future for the field that is equitable and sustainable. Over the course of its first three internationally heralded editions, which hosted 1.5 million visitors, CAB has presented projects created by more than 350 architects, designers, and artists from over 40 countries.
The Available City, the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, is a framework for a collaborative, community-led design approach that presents transformative possibilities for vacant urban spaces that are created with and for local residents. –Chicago Architecture Biennial
(Photo Source: GoodFreePhotos.com)
A Better Government Association column on political gerrymandering of state legislative districts includes perspective from Jim Lewis, senior research specialist at UIC’s Great Cities Institute, who addresses the Supreme Court’s role in the process that leads to strange shaped districts in Illinois.
Jim Lewis, a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, said Illinois’ strange-shaped districts are the expected outcome of a system designed to reward partisan gerrymandering.
Lewis said the result is utterly predictable: runaway gerrymandering. The distorted contortions in Illinois’ new map won’t even be among the worst 10 cases once all 50 states have finished their maps, he said.
“Everybody does it. That’s just the way mapmaking works. Of course, you’re trying for partisan advantage, and the Supreme Court ceded this a couple of years ago,” Lewis said.
The Chicago Tribune interviewed Rob Paral, a senior research specialist with Great Cities Institute, who is helping the city of Aurora analyze data discrepancies to prepare for a Census Bureau recount ask.
Rob Paral, principal of Rob Paral and Associates, a data analysis company that provides demographic, social and economic information about communities, said Aurora showed a decline in population while most of the rest of the Chicago region showed a slight increase.
“So, it makes us wonder what’s going on in Aurora,” Paral said. “Aurora was definitely an outlier here.”
Paral talked to the City Council at its Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday night. The demographics and research expert with the University of Illinois at Chicago Great Cities Institute has assisted more than 100 different human service, advocacy and philanthropic organizations by crunching comparative numbers through the years.
Great Cities Institute is happy to join the Alliance Francaise de Chicago for the opening night and special panel of the Coldefy Exhibition on November 11, 2021, at 6:30 p.m. at 54 W. Chicago Avenue. Attendance is Free with Registration.
Coldefy, an international architecture and urban planning firm based in Lille, France, believes that “architecture shapes our life and should be created for all of our senses.” The panel discussion, featuring Thomas Coldefy and Zoltán Neville, will focus on questions of expression and how a place makes us feel. “What do we see and hear, how does it dialogue with our memories?”
The panel will be moderated by Nicolas Douay, Attaché for Higher Education at Embassy of France in the United States and Deputy Directory of Villa Albertine in Chicago. Joining Coldefy and Neville will be Michael Strautmanis from the Obama Foundation project and Leslie Roth from the Clayco Group. Teresa Córdova Director of the Great Cities Institute will be the discussant. The event will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.
This program is possible thanks to the support of Coldefy and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the US.
Coldefy, The Exhibition opens on November 11 and closes on December 18. Admission is free and you can visit during our business hours: Monday to Friday 9 am to 5 pm, Saturdays 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Closed on Sundays.
Coldefy brings a new type of pragmatism through its projects. Convinced that buildings influence our behavior, just as they shape our cities, Coldefy bases its work on social and sensory experience at the very core of and beyond the matters of aesthetics. Practicing sensitive architecture that is connected to nature and open to the landscape, Coldefy envisions buildings as a desire for tranquility and as opportunities to escape a frenzied pace of living.
Projects by Coldefy leave ample interstitial space, which facilitates a free flow and encourages encounters. They place themselves at the borderline between nature – through the context in which they are based – and personal narratives. These buildings thus reflect the life of their inhabitants and users, becoming spaces for living and communicating. Each Coldefy project leans on three fundamental values: urbanity, clarity, and phenomenology (Coldefy).
This is the second in a series of events this year with the Great Cities Institute and Alliance Francaise as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial . The first was a panel discussion held on October 7, 2021, to launch Les Lumières: Urban Buffet. You can still view the billboard-sized sculpture, which is a three-month light installation on the roof of the Alliance through January 4, 2022. Stay tuned for more upcoming programming with Great Cities and Alliance Francaise.
(Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi, The New Yorker)
An article from The New Yorker on migrant laborers who travel to areas impacted by climate disasters cites related research from Nik Theodore, UIC professor and head of urban planning and policy, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and fellow at the Great Cities Institute.
In a study for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Fe y Justicia Worker Center, Nik Theodore, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, found that more than three-quarters of day laborers in Houston had experienced wage theft, and more than a quarter had been victimized in the month after Hurricane Harvey.
It was very powerful and moving to hear women of color speak about their experiences at the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit October 24-27, 1991. On October 26, 2021, Great Cities Institute and the Just Transition Alliance partnered to bring you this discussion with women, who helped ignite the Environmental Justice Movement, to commemorate thirty years since that Summit in Washington, DC.
In a discussion moderated by Teresa Córdova and José Bravo, Mililani Trask, Pam Tau Lee, Midred McClain, Susana Almanza, Gail Small, and Vernice Miller-Travis addressed the following questions: Why was the summit important to you? What was your experience of developing the seventeen principles; please speak about the importance of the principles? Since the Summit, how have you put those principles to work? What have been some of the victories of the EJ movement? What made women so central to the movement? Please talk about your work and what is your call to action. The wisdom of older women rang clear.
We are honored that we can share the video with you of these iconic women who have blazed trails and fought mightily for the survival of their communities and their homelands. At a time when we are carefully watching what is happening now at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasglow, Scotland, we are grateful to hear the voices of these women who, for decades, have tackled the devastating impacts of toxic wastes in their communities. Eliminating these toxins is a key component in fighting climate change, something that is increasingly becoming more urgent. We thank CANTV, for taping the virtual event and making it available to the public and we thank you for your interest.
As the struggle for an environmental justice continues, stay tuned for two additional events in 2022 commemorating thirty years since this history-making Summit.