The University of Chicago Department of Artography

INTERVIEW: Outside The Loop #469

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY, 10.5.15

My interest in the boundaries created by the University of Chicago was piqued as a first-year during Orientation Week. I noticed that the upperclassmen leading our orientation meetings on transportation and city life did not tell us exactly where we should or shouldn’t go, but instead told us the boundaries of the UofC Police Department’s patrol zone: Lake Shore Drive to the east, Cottage Grove Avenue to the west, 37th Street to the north, and 64th Street to the south. Over the course of my years at the UofC, this definition of space and place in terms of police boundaries became increasingly apparent and significant, especially as tensions have flared among community members unaffiliated with the university who have experienced harassment and racial profiling at the hands of the UCPD. As I began to expand outward from the UCPD boundaries as designators of space and community, I also became interested in the university’s role in Hyde Park’s long history of urban renewal. Already the owner of massive amounts of property outside the patrol zone, the university acquired twenty-six properties in the Washington Park neighborhood between 2008 and 2014 to add to the four charter schools it runs at the patrol zone’s peripheries.