COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

The City
Chapter 3
SETTING
The city is composed of more than just physical space, buildings, and a dense
population; it is ‘social space’ where people are involved in complex and contradictory
relationships. The city is furthermore an illustration or collection of messages, a world of
meanings, a grid of communications, and is a stage or a theater where the struggle among
counterposed material interests takes place (Ferrarotti 1992:25). At the community level,
cities are places where people come into contact with people who have different values,
opinions, and beliefs they find unfamiliar or strange. Cities are filled with these types of
“strangers,” or people unlike themselves. People keep a social distance from each other
while trying to find commonalities. In central cities, residents lack a sense of “common
identity,” but these big cities are a primary location to experience “otherness.” (Frug
1996:1050).
City neighborhoods are constantly influx, with ever-changing economic fortunes,
patterns of immigration and emigration, and development activity. Residents come and
go, and the city’s power over space is exposed. The city’s power over land use has the
ability to radically change the character of the neighborhood without the residents’
consent (Frug 1996:1050). City power is largely invisible, but is made visible through
struggles that take place among residents and city representatives. City power over land
use can further segregate neighborhood residents in a city and “city control has been
exercised principally through cities’ zoning power and through a combination of other
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