Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

From 1976 to 1982, David Ranney worked in several factories in Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana.  In his newest book, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor:  From Outside in and the Inside Out, he shares an account of his experience working in several jobs in a region that once contained one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry in the world. The presence of ten steel mills and associated industries employed hundreds of thousands of workers over a period of several generations.  Today, most of the jobs are gone, but left behind are the stories of the workers and families who made this area their home.  We are thrilled that, along with the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, we are sponsoring a book discussion and signing by Dave on Wednesday, April 10, from 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at the Hull House at 800 S. Halsted.

Living and Dying on the Factory Floor is a vivid description of working in a factory:

The author walks the reader through the heart of the South Side of Chicago, observing the noise, the polluted air, and the rich diversity of people on the street at all hours of the day ad night. His stints at a machine shop, a railroad car factory, a structural steel shop, a box factory, a chemical plan, and a paper cup factory included a wildcat strike, an immigration raid, shop-floor actions protesting supervisor abuses, serious injuries, a failed effort to unionize, and a murder.  Forty years later, Ranney returns to the South Side to reveal what happened to the communities and the companies that had inhabited them, concluding with observations on race and class, the use of immigration policy for social control, and our ability to create a just society.

It will be very interesting to hear Dave, professor emeritus in UIC’s Department of Urban Planning and Policy, speak in more detail about an experience that he theorized in his book, Global Decisions, Local Collision, one of our favorites. No doubt, as he discusses the details of his experiences, we will hear him connect his story to the larger structural dynamics of global economic restructuring.  It’s not too late to RSVP. We invite you to join us for an interesting evening at the Hull House.

This event is the third in our series of book launchings. The first, held on February 20^th and also co-sponsored with the Hull-House Museum, was The World is Watching, edited by Buzz and Alice Palmer and David Robinson and published by Third World Press.  Our second book event on March 15^th, featured the book that emerged from our Cities Across the Globe Symposium Series, Disassembled Cities: Social and Spatial Strategies to Reassemble Cities, edited by Elizabeth Sweet.

Left: Gabrielle Lyon. Right: Alex Linares.

Great Cities Institute is so pleased that Gabrielle Lyon is joining Great Cities to help us build our Cities, Youth and Design Initiative. Alex Linares joins us from the worker cooperative development sector to help build our research on entrepreneurship and workforce development. We are excited to have them as a part of our team. Read their bios below for a preview of what they’ll be working on.

Gabrielle Lyon, Ph.D., is a nationally-recognized non-profit leader, educator, and public speaker with a background that includes launching and leading award-winning social impact organizations and initiatives focused on leveling the playing field of educational opportunity for underserved youth particularly in science, architecture and urban planning. As a senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute she is exploring issues related to cities, youth and design. Questions of interest include: How are youth currently involved in shaping the places they live and learn? What impact do participatory urban experiences have on civic identity? What can be done to generate an evidence base that ensures youth voice informs the development of urban plans at all scales?

Lyon is the author of No Small Plans, a graphic novel that follows the neighborhood adventures of teens in Chicago’s past, present and future designed to ignite urban planning and civic engagement and coeditor of A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools. Lyon received her BA and MA in History from the University of Chicago and her PhD in Curriculum Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Amongst her honors include being named a National After School Champion by the After School Alliance, Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine and a Leadership Fellow with the Chicago Community Trust. You can follow her at @LyonGabrielle or visit Lyon-Strategies.com.

Alex Linares is an Economic Development Planner and will be working on research projects and engagement with community-based organizations. He works primarily within GCI’s research clusters of employment and economic development, and community wellbeing. Linares most recently published report Policy Recommendations for Amendments to the State of Illinois Worker Cooperative Statute was presented at Chicago’s 1st Cooperative Economy Summit.

Linares comes with vast experience in the nonprofit sector working on issues in labor rights, worker cooperatives, interim housing, and workforce development. Previously he worked for the Working World, a non-profit lending organization, where he was assigned to provide technical assistance to New Era Windows Cooperative, the largest manufacturing worker cooperative in Chicago. At New Era Windows, he provided technical assistance in operations management and sales. Linares also worked as an organizer and paralegal for the Working Hands Legal Clinic, which assisted immigrant workers with wage theft cases, and violations of the Illinois Day and Temporary Labor Services Act. He conducted various know your rights labor workshops throughout Chicagoland including Waukegan, Joliet, Melrose Park, and the Mexican Consulate.