Who Is the City For?: Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair Kamin, with photography by Lee Bey. University of Chicago Press, 312 pp., $29.
By the time I got to the last essay in Blair Kamin’s latest collection of his Chicago Tribune columns as the paper’s architecture critic, I wondered if he and I lived in the same city. Or read the same newspapers, even his own. For instance, he writes rather lightly about various tax increment financing– funded projects, barely noting that they are widely criticized (the Reader’s Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke have critically written about them for years, to wide acclaim) and even the conservative Tribune finally editorialized in 2019 that TIFs need at least a major “rethinking” because they have not been beneficial to the neighborhood forced to fund them. Elsewhere, he lauds former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s devotion to transit, pointing to the renovation of various Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) stations starting in 2012. This is inarguably bullshit: I lived near two of the “renovated” stations, Argyle and Berwyn, and neither even got an escalator or received much more than a paint job, all at the cost of millions of dollars per station. (They are only now, finally, undergoing extensive, multi-year renovations that will include elevators.)
Then there’s his uncritical reverence for Barack Obama, about whose Presidential Center he waxes eloquent, paying little heed to the massive resistance mounted against a behemoth of a building that will occupy historic Jackson Park, one of the last remaining landscapes designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. And he thinks Lori Lightfoot is a progressive. Which, well, yes, she is, and that’s been the problem for many of the city’s left and radical activists who have consistently criticized her for her corporation- and cop-loving ways and her opposition to teachers’ strikes.
Of course, we’re meant to overlook all this because, after all, the book has the word “equity” in the subtitle—as in, Who Is the City For?: Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago—but the word seems jammed in there, like an elaborate Art Deco terra-cotta detail slapped onto a Zaha Hadid, shorn of irony or meaning.
To be fair to Kamin, he’s been asking questions about equity and displacement for a while, in his long-running, now-discontinued column. (He has retired.) But to also be clear about Kamin, a good liberal, he hasn’t really engaged with those issues except in the most cursory way, which is to cluck mildly and lament how bad it is to gentrify people out of their neighborhoods and then turn the focus back to the buildings. You could argue that it’s not his job to be anything more than cursory about such matters. But Kamin isn’t looking for an out, having set himself the seemingly profound task of engaging in what he calls “my philosophy of ‘activist criticism.’” Evidently, such an approach considers “buildings in the context of the politics, the economics, and the cultural forces that shape them” and it “bids [readers]…to become citizens who take a leading role in shaping their surroundings.”
The slashing and loss of a vibrant newspaper world and what amounts to a storied publication’s attempt to find housing are manifestations of the crises that envelop the buildings Kamin sees only as built entities. His problem is that he can’t see the capital for all the concrete and glass.
What does all that really do? For Kamin, whose essays here date from 2011 to 2021, it meant probing the disaster that was and is Chicago’s renovated Soldier Field, which he cleverly describes as a “Klingon-meets-Parthenon fiasco.” It also meant vigorously opposing Gordon Gill’s original plans for Trump Tower. Which, to be fair, turned out to be more than fine. It meets its site in a competent manner. Sure, the outsize nameplate is gaudy, but we could argue that Trump has a way of making starkly clear what other robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller were always about: making people see their names attached to buildings, if in slightly more discreet ways. And would Kamin and his like clutch their pearls quite so tightly if the name belonged to a liberal billionaire they liked?
Kamin writes about the ominously dark, Mordor-like Lake Point Tower, which is now the only such building because, five years after it was completed in 1968, the city ruled that no commercial or residential edifice could ever be erected on the historic (and man-made) environment of Chicago’s famed lakefront. You can still buy or rent places with a view of the lake, but they just can’t actually be on the lake, and this is a good thing for the city’s residents who are able (with exceptions being those who can’t afford lake-view housing) to enjoy unhampered excursions to the water’s edge. Kamin’s essay on Lake Point, written on the fiftieth anniversary of its construction, details the history of how it came to be, and why the city was right to ban any more like it.
It’s at points like these that Kamin’s book proves useful and interesting. Chicago’s skyline was, in its heyday, an innovative one, and Kamin’s columns serve as historical reminders of how it came to be. In its inception, Chicago architecture signaled world-historical changes in city making, which suddenly had to cater to white-collar work and the real estate sector. As a matter of historical and geographical happenstance, it was the first out of the gate in this respect, only to be superseded by the building tycoons in Lower Manhattan at the turn of the nineteenth century. But the city’s architectural edge has long been bested by cities like Dubai, with its Burj Khalifa made impossibly iconic by Tom Cruise’s stratospheric antics in 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Or the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, also designed by Gill. (Most of these buildings don’t seem particularly interesting beyond the fact that they are Really, Really, Really Tall, but such is the trend.) But because Kamin writes as a booster for the city, an unofficial but presumably well-paid tour guide, his work doesn’t take account of the complicated ways in which architecture is necessarily sutured to the ebbs and flows of global capital.
Kamin wants to be seen as an “activist.” Fine. But as a critic who cares about the people whom architecture might reflect (literally, as in the case of Chicago’s Bean) and displace (as in the Pilsen developments he writes about), his “activism” is carefully modulated and deeply liberal in that it wants to preserve the status quo—in this case, a beautiful skyline—and not think too hard about the structural inequalities that make it possible, except to occasionally take note of “inequity.” His positions are mainly on aesthetics, noncombative, and easily adopted: He makes much of Trump’s anger at his critique of Trump Tower, but it’s not that hard to earn the man’s ire and anyway, doing so is a quick and easy way to establish a reputation for bravery. All of this is symptomatic of the rise and fall of newspaper criticism itself: Kamin’s Tribune career spanned nearly thirty years, starting in 1998 and ending only with his retirement in 2021. At the end of the last century, newspapers were still thriving and there was money and a built-in audience for a regular column on architecture, a subject that the city’s residents and readers take seriously and with a pride that’s not misplaced: Chicago is home to not only an iconic skyline but vast numbers of exquisite older buildings in various styles, each replete with astonishing detail. But everywhere, these are either being torn down to make way for new development or repurposed into expensive office and condominium buildings, out of the price range of the original residents.
Kamin asks, “Who is the city for?” But a more worthwhile question might be “What is a city for?” When we keep asking who, we focus too much on matters of ownership and inadvertently make it seem as if a city has to belong to individuals (or the corporations that are, we’re told, people).
Kamin’s work and his notion of citizens taking “a leading role in shaping their surroundings” don’t really account for the ongoing displacements all across the city. As Chicago rapidly gentrifies, preservationists fight to keep historic buildings standing while housing activists argue for more low-cost and affordable housing. Kamin takes little notice of such battles and, when he does, ignores the pernicious forces at play and the long-term consequences of development. In Jackson Park, the in-progress Obama Presidential Center has already caused area rents and home prices to skyrocket as outside investors zoom in on various buildings and parcels of land.
Even when Kamin looks outward, as in a column on Shanghai’s changing cityscape, he sees only the buildings. The point about the Shanghai skyscrapers is not that they were designed by Chicago architects, but that this kind of development-on-steroids brutally manifests the shifts of global capital. Architecture is how a city or an entire country gains respectability. Consider, again, Dubai: Densely populated by expatriates from all over the world, it really launched itself onto the global stage with the Burj. More recently, Qatar exploited a massive migrant force to build stadiums and more for the World Cup in football while “undeterred by accusations of naked corruption,” as the late Leijia Hanrahan put it in NYRA #32. Saudi Arabia—the country that brutally assassinated dissident journalist Jamāl Aḥmad Khāshqujī—is eyeing a joint bid for the 2030 World Cup, along with Egypt and Greece. Meanwhile, the same extremely repressive country has announced what amounts to the architectural boast of the century: not just a tech-equipped one-off megastructure (so pifflingly early twenty-first century) but an entire city for nine million called The Line, which promises to rival anything seen in Dune.
Kamin wants his legacy to be the activism he claims to uphold, but in aid of what? In an exit interview with Chicago magazine, he proudly notes that his work led to more use of Grant Park, which, according to him, had a “split personality, jammed and vibrant during the summer festivals and pretty much dead otherwise” and “a much more vibrant place than it was 20 years ago.” In fact, residents near the park are growing increasingly fed up with the noise and inconvenience of festivals like Lollapalooza in their vicinity. Elsewhere, Kamin claims that Jackson Park was “underutilized”: He sees a large park that is just that, a park, empty for large stretches of the day and so useless and “dead.” For Kamin, a city and its architecture are worth the time only if people are always using them, like the idealized scenes in architectural renderings of people busily walking their dogs and children and stopping in at bustling coffee shops, all under idyllic blue watercolor skies.
With this book, Kamin reveals himself as someone who got lost in the boosterism required of an architecture critic. It’s not too much to ask that someone in such a privileged position should take the now new and fierce context of global capitalism more seriously because it affects his job as much as it affects which buildings get built. The Tribune has made no signs of hiring anyone in Kamin’s old position. On the other hand, the Sun-Times recently hired Lee Bey as its architecture critic, and Bey (disclosure: a comrade in the city) took most of the photographs for Kamin’s anthology. Bey has also been an archivist of the incredible buildings on the South Side, especially those by Black architects, that are often marked for development or demolition. But can Chicago distinguish between preservation and memory for the sake of memory? What does preservation mean beyond simply making sure that buildings and other structures stay intact, and if they are not also repurposed to fit the needs of their neighborhoods? Obama could have chosen from any number of spectacular buildings on the South Side if he truly intended to reinvigorate the area, as he claims, but instead he hurled a behemoth into a public park. Chicago, ever wary of being relegated to flyover status, is relentlessly boosterist: How far will it let any critic make these tensions palpable?
In 2019 the historic Tribune Tower was sold to condo developers and the dwindling newspaper’s remaining staff moved first to One Prudential Plaza a few blocks south and then, less than three years later, out of downtown to its own printing center, as a cost-cutting measure. None of this is unconnected: The slashing and loss of a vibrant newspaper world and what amounts to a storied publication’s attempt to find housing are manifestations of the crises that envelop the buildings Kamin sees only as built entities. His problem is that he can’t see the capital for all the concrete and glass.
Kamin asks, “Who is the city for?” But a more worthwhile question might be “What is a city for?” When we keep asking who, we focus too much on matters of ownership and inadvertently make it seem as if a city has to belong to individuals (or the corporations that are, we’re told, people). But if we ask what a city is for, the answer is more liberating: it’s for wandering, for commerce, for living, for pleasure, for perambulations, and for simply sitting in a gigantic park and being able to see the cityscape on one side and nothing but acres of grass on the other.