The Coupling of Urban Growth and Public Safety: Interrogating Media Discourse, Power, and Abolitionist Praxis In Chicago

Background and Purpose: Economic development is frequently celebrated as beneficial for U.S. cities. However, this “growth machine” ideology is constructed and propelled by political and economic elites, often obscuring potential harms such as displacement, exclusion, and the concentration of wealth. At the same time, discourses surrounding public safety have operated as ideological strategies that expand the reach and legitimacy of the carceral state. Scholars have examined connections between economic growth, racialized incarceration, and increased policing in gentrifying neighborhoods, yet limited research investigates how urban growth and public safety are discursively and politically linked. This study examines how these discourses are coupled using Chicago media archives to better understand how rhetoric around safety, crime, growth, and economic development are linked with each other. Chicago is leveraged as a case site for this discursive analysis, as a city that is a frequent target of rhetoric and practice around urban development and public safety.

Methods: This study leverages critical discourse analysis (CDA) on articles from the archive of the Chicago Tribune from 2010 to 2024. This period is characterized by both heightened national discourse around criminal legal reform and ongoing urban development initiatives. Articles were identified through keyword searches related to public safety, crime, urban growth, and economic development. This yielded over 1,300 potential articles for inclusion, and articles were further screened for relevance. Using CDA, we analyze the discursive relationships between economic development and public safety, emphasizing the framing around “problems” and “solutions,” as well as ideological assumptions embedded within the texts. To contextualize discursive patterns spatially, references to neighborhoods and locations within the articles are extracted and mapped using administrative demographic data, including race and poverty indicators. This mixed discursive and spatial approach allows us to examine how these coupled narratives are distributed across the urban landscape.

Results: Analysis suggests that economic development and public safety are the top priorities for communities. Economic development is frequently identified as a strategy for improving public safety and to reduce neighborhood crime. In some instances, however, economic development and traditional strategies for public safety (i.e. policing) were framed against each other depending on political ideology. These discourses frequently emphasize redevelopment in neighborhoods characterized by high poverty rates or racialized marginalization, while minimizing discussion of potential displacement or alternatives to carceral strategies to enhance overall community wellbeing.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings suggest that the discursive coupling of urban growth and public safety rhetoric contributes to the legitimization of economic development-oriented “solutions” to criminalized behavior while obscuring structural inequality and potential harms such as displacement and intensified surveillance. For social work, these narratives raise important questions about how investments framed as community safety initiatives may reproduce carceral logics or advance exclusionary urban development. As the field increasingly engages with abolitionist and anti-carceral frameworks, critically examining the ideological coupling of development and safety becomes essential. Just as importantly, social work must consider how these frameworks are embedded in our scholarship – from project conceptualization through analysis and dissemination – and these implications will also be discussed.