Chicago Neighborhoods, Mapped By Residents: Here’s Where Locals Think Official Boundaries Should Be

“Chicagoans take their neighborhood pride seriously, whether cheering on their local high school sports team or touting the superiority of a nearby pizza joint. However, defining the city’s intertwining tapestry of neighborhoods can be subject to debate.

“While often referred to as a ‘city of neighborhoods,’ Chicago doesn’t actually have officially recognized neighborhoods. Instead, the city has 77 “community areas,” which were originally mapped out by two University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s.

“A new study out of the University of Chicago aims to give an updated look at where the city’s complex web of neighborhood boundaries actually fall.

“‘Neighborhoods are very core to people’s sense of identity,’ UChicago researcher Crystal Bae said. “You always hear people talk about where they live in Chicago. They have a very strong individual tie to place.”

“Last November, Emily Talen, a University of Chicago social sciences professor, told Block Club she wanted to update the research done in the 1920s to better understand how residents perceive their neighborhoods today.

“The city’s 77 community areas, though they’re not ‘innocuous lines on a map,’ are not really neighborhoods either, Talen said. While many Chicago community areas average about 35,000 people, the typical definition of a neighborhood encompasses 5,000 people, she said.

“‘It’s just amazing how [community areas] have stuck,’ Talen said. “The city now relies on them in various ways. They orient policy around these community areas.’

“That led Talen to launch the Chicago Neighborhood Project, distributing a survey that asked Chicagoans to identify their neighborhoods and draw its boundaries.

“The project was run by the Urbanism Lab at the University of Chicago. Working with Talen were Bae, an assistant instructional professor in the university’s Center for Spatial Data Science, and Lydia Wileden, a former UChicago postdoctoral scholar who now works at the University of Connecticut as an assistant research professor.

“The survey ran for more than 20 weeks, from November 2023 through April 2024. It was translated into Spanish, Polish and Mandarin and promoted through online advertising, coverage by local media, email distribution lists, social media and paper flyers, Bae said.

“Researchers collected just over 5,500 responses, identifying more than 100 unique neighborhoods.

“Respondents initially submitted about 550 different neighborhood names. However, some of the names included typos or were variations like ‘Smith Park-ish’ instead of just ‘Smith Park,’ Bae said. After cleaning the data and narrowing down the names to the ones used by the most respondents, the team was left with 120 neighborhoods, Bae said.” (DeVore, Block Club Chicago, 12/4/24)

Read the full story at Block Club Chicago

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