Chicago is make up of 77 "community areas", each of which contain either one or a few neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has a strong community identify due to its location, the people that live there, and the culture that its inhabitants express.

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While each neighborhood has its own identities, they are not all equal in terms of resources. Segregation runs deep in Chicago's history, with its south and west sides being disproportionately underfunded and under-resourced compared to the north side communities. 

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The City of Chicago has recently began its "Invest South/West" program, which aims to revitalize 10 historic neighborhoods on the South and West sides of the city. We applaud the initiative to focus our city's efforts on those struggling areas, but we also are critical of how to help.

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The Invest South/West program is a top-down approach - the city holds a competition for architects and developers to be on the shortlist of candidates and they decide the programming and built work that will be constructed on a few selected sites.

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We believe in a bottom-up approach, and we always have. We have been working on projects on the south and west sides of Chicago for years now. The way to successfully reinvigorate and help these neighborhoods is to amplify the voices, culture, businesses, and people that already exist there. It is imperative to intervene in an empathetic way.

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Below are a few examples of our work on the south and west sides, as well as a description of how we see this project affecting the neighborhood as a whole, for the better.