In Chicago, both the perpetrators and the victims of violence are disproportionately Black. But that doesn’t happen in a vacuum, notes David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. He argues that conflict in low-income Black communities is heightened not merely by the city’s negligence but by its “planned abandonment” of these residents. A Chicago native who grew up in Calumet Heights and now lives in East Woodlawn, Stovall examines these dynamics in his new book, Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago, which he describes as an “amalgamation of conversations, observations, and research” from the past 25 years. Writes Stovall: “As tensions grow in a moment with severely limited access to education, affordable housing, living-wage employment, and health care, Black people are often villainized for a situation that they did not create.”

Is focusing on structural issues letting those who commit violence off the hook?

What I wanted to do is entertain a different conversation, to say, “Don’t look at what folks are saying about young people individually as the sole [cause of violence].” The narrative of the inherently violent young person is just not accurate in terms of what we know about conflict. In Chicago, we’ve had no contextual understanding of what generates violence. With the changes around the city, particularly school closings and the destruction of public housing, you’re creating or deepening conflict zones.

So you’re contextualizing the violence, not excusing it?

 If we understand violence, our work towards solutions is much different. You have more [information] to actually interrupt it. Because you won’t arrest your way out of this. If you view people as disposable, you’ll never have a conversation with them about what’s going on in their world: “What has elevated these levels of stress? What are you concerned about? Who do you care about?” Those conversations are reserved for people with money.

How are you sure that engineered conflict is real and not just a conspiracy theory?

I had a conversation with a professor named Katherine Cho, who’s now at Loyola. As an undergrad, she studied engineering. She said, “Engineering has a particular purpose: the elimination of human error.” When she said that, the first thing that came to my mind was, Who has been deemed to be the error here, and how are [those in power] working to eliminate or minimize that error? When you think about areas like Woodlawn, Kenwood, Cabrini-Green, resources have been taken out of those spaces, and now you have this huge push to put resources back into them, absent the original [Black] residents. In 1990, U.S. census data had Kenwood as one of the poorest communities per capita [in the city]. Now you’ve got million-dollar homes. The question becomes: Who’s been cleared out for that particular type of development to happen?

You point to spiking property taxes as an engineered factor pushing people out of a gentrifying area. Isn’t that just the natural byproduct of a community improving?

It is one thing when a development effort is centered around the people who live there. It’s another when the development is solely about making money.

What does centering development around the people who live there look like exactly?

That’s what’s referred to as responsible or sustainable community development. The first rule is making sure that the people who have historically been there are allowed to stay. And anything you build, you have to be able to maintain. The maintenance of a building has to be a line item in the budget, not something that relies on rents. And home sales have to be below market rate. If you’re going to do something that’s sustainable, residents have to have a long-term arrangement with the developer. The understanding is that the developer’s return will be less but it will be contributing to the common good. The organization Preservation of Affordable Housing does some of this in Woodlawn. Another example is Wentworth Gardens, right by Rate Field. Those units are all tenant-run. They have a whole infrastructure and ecosystem set up around that. The tenants have explicit ownership in the process.

You assert that policing in certain communities is not so much about protecting longtime residents as paving the way for gentrification by “prioritizing the city’s will to clear and protect space for those who have been deemed valuable.” Can you elaborate?

Chicago has a unique relationship to this. [Historically], police weren’t designed to protect the broader community. Police were designed to protect the property of local millionaires who were making their money in meatpacking, steel, and textiles. Police forces were actually set up to regulate the people who were organizing to protect their labor. That relationship has now become more concentrated in Black spaces, because some of those Black spaces are viewed as prime property.

You’ve described Chicago public school closures as deliberate acts of “displacement and dispossession” that have fractured the Black community. Couldn’t some of the closures have been motivated by resource shortfalls or fiscal mismanagement as opposed to a racially based intent?

The line that I draw between fiscal mismanagement and engineered conflict is some of the planning that went on, post-closures. The largest closure was in 2013, but you had some earlier in the 2000s. Those actually concerned me just as much for this reason: When you look at the closing of a high school like Austin on the West Side, the students were sent seven miles away to Clemente. If you’re sending young folks through all these different neighborhoods to a place where you know they’re not known, how can you not expect conflict? There are schools that are closer to Austin than Clemente. The purposeful part was that one of those schools is Taft, but they said they didn’t have room for the students. Taft is one of the whitest nonselective enrollment schools in the city.

You write about ways that Chicagoans have created their own “fugitive” groups to better the living situations in these communities and create self-sufficiency, like the South Side–based #LetUsBreathe, a collective of artists and activists, and Ujimaa Medics, which provides and teaches emergency first-response skills. Are you hopeful that the overall system will change, or are people going to have to keep bucking it by creating their own subsystems?

These efforts are not rooted in any kind of attempt to “overthrow.” It’s really about saying, “There’s a different way to do it.” The solutions are there. But do we have the space to build off them? There’s a mental health program that started out of Eugene, Oregon, called CAHOOTS [Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets]; 911 there was getting all these mental health calls, and CAHOOTS said, “We’ve got folks who are trained in dealing with that. What if we set up a call line for people experiencing mental health episodes and we become the responder?” The Eugene police said, “You’re onto something. Could you work with us?” CAHOOTS came to Chicago and [Mayor Lori] Lightfoot was like, “No, we can’t do that.”

How does this city change its thinking?

One of the most important things is to ask: Who are the folks on the margins? Now they need to be in the center of our analysis. Not this Band-Aid work but rather: These are folks who are central to the function of the city. They are not disposable. They are not throwaway people. We’ve got to do right by them.