When Architecture Meets Activism: The Transformative Experience of Hank Williams Village in the Windy City by Roger Guy (review)

Many are familiar with Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses's legendary battle over plans to remake New York City's Greenwich Village through urban renewal in the 1960s. Jacobs championed a community-based approach to city building and criticized Moses for ignoring poverty and racism. Through grassroots community organizing, Jacobs, a mother and a journalist without a college degree, handed one of New York City's most powerful men a rare defeat. This battle represented a paradigm shift in planning and architecture and now plays a primary role in urban design, planning, and historic preservation education.

In When Architecture Meets Activism: The Transformative Experience of Hank Williams Village in the Windy City, Roger Guy details another David versus Goliath planning battle, one that took place in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood around the time of the Jacobs and Moses brawl. Guy relies on extensive interviews and archival research to reveal the story of how a coalition of advocacy planners, architects, poor community members, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) workers fought efforts to displace hundreds of poor white southern migrants to make way for a new college. He describes the long, heated standoff between the neighborhood's poor and wealthy residents, all of whom believed their futures were at stake. Each saw the public good differently and were unwilling to compromise, resulting in a political roller coaster. Unlike with Jacobs and Moses, there were no clear winners.

Guy describes Uptown as a "port of entry" for society's forgotten (p. xii). It was home to an intriguing mix of residents, including poor white Appalachians fleeing coal country, Japanese Americans released from internment camps, Native Americans leaving reservations, Latinos, and African Americans fleeing the South. He reveals how these diverse groups formed a "Rainbow Coalition" to fight the city's urban renewal plans to construct Harry S. Truman College in the heart of Uptown and displace hundreds of primarily poor Appalachian families (p. 73).

With the help of the Uptown Community Design Center and VISTA architects, the resistance developed an alternative plan that centered on rehabilitating and preserving buildings slated for demolition. Their alternative, the Hank Williams Village, aimed to provide low-income cooperatively and individually owned housing by using federal subsidies and private funding to refurbish historic apartment buildings. Plans incorporated a cooperatively owned grocery store, laundry, pharmacy, hotel, credit union, childcare center, playgrounds, and a medical center. "The centerpiece of the Village was a town hall and welcome center, which," Guy argues, "acknowledged the neighborhood's status [as a] port of entry for migrants" (pp. 138–39).

Guy is at his best when analyzing the complicated lives and motivations of coalition members, primarily male leaders, whose stories are usually hidden in macro studies but are made visible here by his extensive use of interviews. Surprisingly, he concludes that the Uptown resistance was important because it influenced the careers of the architects involved, even if it failed to entirely prevent the displacement of poor Appalachian families. Throughout the book, Guy uses Appalachia and South interchangeably, and he frequently claims that community leader Chuck Geary was from Appalachia. Yet Geary was born and raised in Jugville, Grayson County, Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia. Guy also misspells Grayson ("Greyson") County, just one of numerous typos found throughout the book (p. 89).

Some readers may find the book's emphasis on individual biographies a weakness. Guy is a professor of sociology and criminal justice, not a historian, architect, urban planner, or preservationist, and he fails to employ secondary literature from these fields to contextualize his findings. Further, while he mentions the role that apartment buildings played in Uptown's history and briefly describes the plan for Hank Williams Village, he provides few interpretative and communicative tools—such as photographs, drawings, or maps that architectural historians, historians, historic preservationists, and designers...