Background
In 1942, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began construction on the Cabrini-Green Homes, a massive array of public housing in what was considered, at the time, a “slum” neighborhood. The housing included both row homes and a massive set of high rises that, at its peak, housed 15,000 people (Guzzardi, 2011). It was part of a post-World War II government effort to meet unprecedented urban housing needs. By 2011, the housing, along with all that came with it – crime, violence, poverty, but also a strong sense of community – was gone. After many years of historic neglect on the part of the CHA and a 4 year takeover of the CHA by The Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD), the city of Chicago made plans to demolish all of the city’s …show more content…
This approach starts from below with people’s lives and it defines social mobility and well-being in terms of opportunities. As Martha Nussbaum states, “such an approach had better begin close to the ground, looking at life stories, and the human meaning of policy changes for real people” (Nussbaum 2011, 14). The capabilities approach demands one central question according to Nussbaum, “what is each person able to do and be?” (Nussbaum 2011, 18). The capabilities approach was coined jointly by Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Martha S. Nussbaum. It is both an empirical assessment and also a normative framework. It is both a way to theorize about social justice, but also a method of evaluation based on comparative quality of life assessment. It is an evaluative framework used to judge the degree to which government policy increased or decreased the quality of life for all people as defined by their capabilities. It is meant to go beyond monetary indicators of well-being. Income and employment are commonly used to capture a person’s well-being, and yet, we know that well-being is constitutive of a much richer set of factors. For example, one’s social relations and integration in a community is a significant contributor to people’s well-being. As Grusky and Weeden (2006, 87) point out, “income-based measures and arbitrary discretizations of those measures fail to capture the social organization of inequality, including the emergence of social networks, norms, and “adaptive preferences” (i.e. tastes, culture) within various social groupings”. Researchers, scholars, and activists have all contributed to the discourse on capabilities resulting in a significant amount of literature (Comim, Qizilbash, and Alkire, 2008) which at times stays at
In 1942, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began construction on the Cabrini-Green Homes, a massive array of public housing in what was considered, at the time, a “slum” neighborhood. The housing included both row homes and a massive set of high rises that, at its peak, housed 15,000 people (Guzzardi, 2011). It was part of a post-World War II government effort to meet unprecedented urban housing needs. By 2011, the housing, along with all that came with it – crime, violence, poverty, but also a strong sense of community – was gone. After many years of historic neglect on the part of the CHA and a 4 year takeover of the CHA by The Housing and Urban Development Agency (HUD), the city of Chicago made plans to demolish all of the city’s …show more content…
This approach starts from below with people’s lives and it defines social mobility and well-being in terms of opportunities. As Martha Nussbaum states, “such an approach had better begin close to the ground, looking at life stories, and the human meaning of policy changes for real people” (Nussbaum 2011, 14). The capabilities approach demands one central question according to Nussbaum, “what is each person able to do and be?” (Nussbaum 2011, 18). The capabilities approach was coined jointly by Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Martha S. Nussbaum. It is both an empirical assessment and also a normative framework. It is both a way to theorize about social justice, but also a method of evaluation based on comparative quality of life assessment. It is an evaluative framework used to judge the degree to which government policy increased or decreased the quality of life for all people as defined by their capabilities. It is meant to go beyond monetary indicators of well-being. Income and employment are commonly used to capture a person’s well-being, and yet, we know that well-being is constitutive of a much richer set of factors. For example, one’s social relations and integration in a community is a significant contributor to people’s well-being. As Grusky and Weeden (2006, 87) point out, “income-based measures and arbitrary discretizations of those measures fail to capture the social organization of inequality, including the emergence of social networks, norms, and “adaptive preferences” (i.e. tastes, culture) within various social groupings”. Researchers, scholars, and activists have all contributed to the discourse on capabilities resulting in a significant amount of literature (Comim, Qizilbash, and Alkire, 2008) which at times stays at