American Behavioral Scientist, Ahead of Print.
The peaks and valleys written into Chicago’s 42nd Ward outline themselves against what space is legible to ticketers in the city’s hungriest vehicle ticketing district. It is a space that defies the racial geography of ticketing in Chicago, where predatory practices prey on communities of color as though they are the city’s slush fund. In the 42nd Ward, ticketing is like a language that is spoken in a specific geometric dialect. Those who issue them speak with a street-level fluency that omits a vocabulary of verticality, where space is readable only through narrow focus that sees what is at ground-level but not below or above it. In a district that features high volumes of automobility but little street parking, the ward’s ticketing hotspots are territorial soft targets that stand out like italicized font to flag the ticketer’s attention. Camouflaged in the unarticulated White space that separates one word from another are vertical sanctuaries from surveillance and sanction. The district is a White space in both a figurative and literal sense, given the racial position of who wrote these words, which vested interests they advance, and to what ends.