How to See Through a Blind Alley: Participatory Disruptions of Chicago’s “Cul-de-Sac Initiative,” ca. 1993

In 1993, in an effort to curb a soaring murder rate, Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced what he dubbed the “cul-de-sac initiative.” The plan involved breaking up the gridded layout of the city’s streets by creating “blind alleys” that would in theory limit outlets available to drive-by shooters, thereby deterring violent crime. Although ultimately abandoned, the proposal was temporarily executed as an experiment, resulting in transformations to the city’s navigation networks that remain palpable today, especially in the Pilsen neighborhood. At the time, the initiative gave rise to public outcry on the grounds that it would isolate already marginalized communities by limiting access to and from discrete neighborhoods. One of the most generative responses came in the form of an artwork initiated by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle as part of the citywide exhibition of participatory art, Culture in Action, which had been organized by Mary Jane Jacob of Sculpture Chicago. For his contribution, Manglano-Ovalle collaborated with young residents of his own West Town neighborhood to stage video installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and in the streets of West Town. This paper explores how the various instantiations of the project, which were cast as modes of televisual mapping, intervened in contemporaneous debates on urbanism and mobility in Chicago. In contrast to arguments defending the cul-de-sac initiative, Tele-Vecindario proposed that art might provide a means of seeing across—rather than further dividing—territories within the city that were otherwise portrayed as irrevocably hostile to one another.