William Sites
Biographic Data
| ID | 220178 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Sites |
| GIVEN NAMES | William |
| FAMILY NAME | Sites |
| SIGNATURE | SITES W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-4936-8784 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Chicago Casino for Racial Equity: Strategic Racialization and Community Resistance Across Contexts
Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the cit…
Alinsky and Abolition
Nonprofit ‐ Led Neoliberal Growth Machines and the Privatization of Community Engagement: The Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side
We analyze the development of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago as the product of a new kind of urban growth machine—a nonprofit‐led neoliberal growth machine. Building on studies of nonprofit‐led urban development as well as research on CBA‐driven opposition, we reconstruct how an Obama Foundation‐led growth machine was able to dominate pre‐development planning, privatize public parkland and mount its own private community engagement proc…
Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and the Problem of Ideology
Critical race theories of ideology, surprisingly, replicate key tensions in early Marxist thought. Following a selective review of several Marxist theorists, this article examines critical race conceptions of racial ideology within the influential work of Charles W. Mills and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, probing three related problem areas: an 'expressive' theory of society, the correspondence of ideologies to racial groups, and an overreliance on stan…
Chicago Blues Dreams
The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem
Contemporary Harlem, with its multimillion-dollar townhouses and majority non-black population, may seem to have little connection to the area’s twentieth-century history as a racially segregated yet culturally pre-eminent black Mecca. James Weldon Johnson, celebrating the community’s initial renaissance in the 1920s, was able to imagine a hypothetical moment when its blocks might be wrested away from African Americans but only in the far-distant…
The bi-national road to immigrant rights mobilization: States, social movements and Chicago's Mexican hometown associations
Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from a…
We Travel the Spaceways: Urban Utopianism and the Imagined Spaces of Black Experimental Music
Recent geographical studies of music (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Wood et al., 2007) suggest their potential to contribute to critical utopian thinking. This study offers a preliminary examination of musical utopianism, focusing in particular on its contribution to several questions provoked by the emerging dialogue between urban spatial theory and artistic cultural practice (Pinder, 2008). Drawing insights from philosophy, musicology, sociology, geogr…
New Directions in Urban Theory: Introduction
(2012). New Directions in Urban Theory: Introduction. Urban Geography: Vol. 33, New Directions in Urban Theory, pp. 469-473
Radical Culture in Black Necropolis: Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and Postwar Chicago
Post–World War II urban history, by prioritizing either political economy or cultural consumption, has tended to produce narratives of African American experience that emphasize marginalization or incorporation. This article examines a group of Chicago activists and musicians surrounding the jazz experimentalist Sun Ra and his business partner Alton Abraham to explore the contribution of radical political currents and heterodox cultural practices…
God from the Machine? Urban Movements Meet Machine Politics in Neoliberal Chicago
This paper examines the anti-Wal-Mart and immigrant rights movements in Chicago in order to understand how local political institutions influence dynamics of exclusion and incorporation. Tracing the post-1970s reconfiguration of the city's machine politics, I argue that a mayor-centered neoclientelism has enabled the local state to flexibly manage the political challenges posed by movements. This analysis seeks to contribute to broader conception…
What Do We Really Know About Racial Inequality? Labor Markets, Politics, and the Historical Basis of Black Economic Fortunes
Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black-white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives a…
Reframing Community Practice for the 21 St Century: Multiple Traditions, Multiple Challenges
“Community” in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting attack, challenged by so…
Beyond Trenches and Grassroots? Reflections on Urban Mobilization, Fragmentation, and the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in Chicago
Studies of the relationship between urban-based contention and neoliberal capitalism have recognized the relatively fluid and potentially empowering ways in which networked and multiscaled mobilizations strive to overcome fragmentation. Yet this work has not focused sufficiently on national urban politics for understanding the legacies of division and circumscription that may shape the city as a terrain of conflict. Reconsidering two classic trea…
Progressive Regionalism: A “Deliberative” Movement
Global City, American City: Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History
City and Region: Reinventing Spatial Community
Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement
Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term 'primitive globalization' in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital , this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neolibera…
The Limits of Urban Regime Theory: New York City under Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani
The author evaluates urban regime theory as an approach to understanding development and housing policy in New York City since the 1970s. Strong elements of policy continuity are explained by the impact of economic restructuring, federal retrenchment, and interest-group pressures. The relatively modest shifts in policy that did take place are related to changes in the local real estate market and community mobilization as well as to the political…
Rebuilding the Inner City: A History of Neighborhood Initiatives to Address Poverty in the United States . Robert Halpern
The Limits of Urban Regime Theory: New York City under Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani
The author evaluates urban regime theory as an approach to understanding development and housing policy in New York City since the 1970s. Strong elements of policy continuity are explained by the impact of economic restructuring, federal retrenchment, and interest-group pressures. The relatively modest shifts in policy that did take place are related to changes in the local real estate market and community mobilization as well as to the political…
Reframing Community Practice for the 21 St Century: Multiple Traditions, Multiple Challenges
“Community” in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting attack, challenged by so…
Beyond Trenches and Grassroots? Reflections on Urban Mobilization, Fragmentation, and the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in Chicago
Studies of the relationship between urban-based contention and neoliberal capitalism have recognized the relatively fluid and potentially empowering ways in which networked and multiscaled mobilizations strive to overcome fragmentation. Yet this work has not focused sufficiently on national urban politics for understanding the legacies of division and circumscription that may shape the city as a terrain of conflict. Reconsidering two classic trea…
What Do We Really Know About Racial Inequality? Labor Markets, Politics, and the Historical Basis of Black Economic Fortunes
Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black-white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives a…
Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement
Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term 'primitive globalization' in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital , this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neolibera…
The bi-national road to immigrant rights mobilization: States, social movements and Chicago's Mexican hometown associations
Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from a…
God from the Machine? Urban Movements Meet Machine Politics in Neoliberal Chicago
This paper examines the anti-Wal-Mart and immigrant rights movements in Chicago in order to understand how local political institutions influence dynamics of exclusion and incorporation. Tracing the post-1970s reconfiguration of the city's machine politics, I argue that a mayor-centered neoclientelism has enabled the local state to flexibly manage the political challenges posed by movements. This analysis seeks to contribute to broader conception…
We Travel the Spaceways: Urban Utopianism and the Imagined Spaces of Black Experimental Music
Recent geographical studies of music (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Wood et al., 2007) suggest their potential to contribute to critical utopian thinking. This study offers a preliminary examination of musical utopianism, focusing in particular on its contribution to several questions provoked by the emerging dialogue between urban spatial theory and artistic cultural practice (Pinder, 2008). Drawing insights from philosophy, musicology, sociology, geogr…
Global City, American City: Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History
Rebuilding the Inner City: A History of Neighborhood Initiatives to Address Poverty in the United States . Robert Halpern
The Limits of Urban Regime Theory: New York City under Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani
The author evaluates urban regime theory as an approach to understanding development and housing policy in New York City since the 1970s. Strong elements of policy continuity are explained by the impact of economic restructuring, federal retrenchment, and interest-group pressures. The relatively modest shifts in policy that did take place are related to changes in the local real estate market and community mobilization as well as to the political…
City and Region: Reinventing Spatial Community
Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement
Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term 'primitive globalization' in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital , this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neolibera…
Global City, American City: Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History
Progressive Regionalism: A “Deliberative” Movement
Reframing Community Practice for the 21 St Century: Multiple Traditions, Multiple Challenges
“Community” in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting attack, challenged by so…
Beyond Trenches and Grassroots? Reflections on Urban Mobilization, Fragmentation, and the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in Chicago
Studies of the relationship between urban-based contention and neoliberal capitalism have recognized the relatively fluid and potentially empowering ways in which networked and multiscaled mobilizations strive to overcome fragmentation. Yet this work has not focused sufficiently on national urban politics for understanding the legacies of division and circumscription that may shape the city as a terrain of conflict. Reconsidering two classic trea…
What Do We Really Know About Racial Inequality? Labor Markets, Politics, and the Historical Basis of Black Economic Fortunes
Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black-white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives a…
We Travel the Spaceways: Urban Utopianism and the Imagined Spaces of Black Experimental Music
Recent geographical studies of music (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Wood et al., 2007) suggest their potential to contribute to critical utopian thinking. This study offers a preliminary examination of musical utopianism, focusing in particular on its contribution to several questions provoked by the emerging dialogue between urban spatial theory and artistic cultural practice (Pinder, 2008). Drawing insights from philosophy, musicology, sociology, geogr…
New Directions in Urban Theory: Introduction
(2012). New Directions in Urban Theory: Introduction. Urban Geography: Vol. 33, New Directions in Urban Theory, pp. 469-473
Radical Culture in Black Necropolis: Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and Postwar Chicago
Post–World War II urban history, by prioritizing either political economy or cultural consumption, has tended to produce narratives of African American experience that emphasize marginalization or incorporation. This article examines a group of Chicago activists and musicians surrounding the jazz experimentalist Sun Ra and his business partner Alton Abraham to explore the contribution of radical political currents and heterodox cultural practices…
God from the Machine? Urban Movements Meet Machine Politics in Neoliberal Chicago
This paper examines the anti-Wal-Mart and immigrant rights movements in Chicago in order to understand how local political institutions influence dynamics of exclusion and incorporation. Tracing the post-1970s reconfiguration of the city's machine politics, I argue that a mayor-centered neoclientelism has enabled the local state to flexibly manage the political challenges posed by movements. This analysis seeks to contribute to broader conception…
The bi-national road to immigrant rights mobilization: States, social movements and Chicago's Mexican hometown associations
Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from a…
The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem
Contemporary Harlem, with its multimillion-dollar townhouses and majority non-black population, may seem to have little connection to the area’s twentieth-century history as a racially segregated yet culturally pre-eminent black Mecca. James Weldon Johnson, celebrating the community’s initial renaissance in the 1920s, was able to imagine a hypothetical moment when its blocks might be wrested away from African Americans but only in the far-distant…
Chicago Blues Dreams
Nonprofit ‐ Led Neoliberal Growth Machines and the Privatization of Community Engagement: The Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side
We analyze the development of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago as the product of a new kind of urban growth machine—a nonprofit‐led neoliberal growth machine. Building on studies of nonprofit‐led urban development as well as research on CBA‐driven opposition, we reconstruct how an Obama Foundation‐led growth machine was able to dominate pre‐development planning, privatize public parkland and mount its own private community engagement proc…
Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and the Problem of Ideology
Critical race theories of ideology, surprisingly, replicate key tensions in early Marxist thought. Following a selective review of several Marxist theorists, this article examines critical race conceptions of racial ideology within the influential work of Charles W. Mills and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, probing three related problem areas: an 'expressive' theory of society, the correspondence of ideologies to racial groups, and an overreliance on stan…
A Chicago Casino for Racial Equity: Strategic Racialization and Community Resistance Across Contexts
Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the cit…
Alinsky and Abolition
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (8 works) · Economics (6 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (6 works) · Art (4 works)