Wentworth Gardens Public Housing Residents
Roberta Feldman, University of Illinois at Chicago
Susan Stall, Northeastern Illinois University



Sociologist Susan Stall and psychologist/architect Roberta Feldman worked with women of Wentworth Gardens public housing development in the Armour Square neighborhood, as well as with various graduate students. The research phase of the project lasted nearly eight years, and its goal was to investigate the prior and current community-building activities of resident activists in Wentworth Gardens. A concurrent goal was to challenge negative stereotypes about residents of public housing.



The chief investigators (Stall/Feldman), graduate students and residents used open-ended interviews, observations at meetings, focus groups, questionnaires and existing data/archival research. Researchers found that the struggles of the women in the Wentworth Gardens public housing development to improve their lives and the lives of their fellow residents, while admirable, point toward larger systemic problems with the ways public housing programs are under-funded and poorly managed.

Based on the findings, residents and researchers took action in a variety of ways:

• Residents of Wentworth Gardens were part of a telecourse, "Women and Social Action", aired by PBS that includes the Wentworth residents activists in a one hour segment entitled "Low Income Women's Resistance."
• Stall worked with residents to organize and chair the Wentworth Gardens Resident Management Community Advisory Board which served as a conduit for residents access to material and technical resources in the greater Chicago area.
• Feldman worked with Wentworth Garden residents on a feasibility study for a new, adjacent shopping center through conducting participatory design workshops.
• Wentworth Gardens residents participated in conference and colloquium presentations with the researchers.
• Wentworth Gardens resident Mary Rias was one of four section of the Living Together exhibit which opened at individuals featured in a video as part of the "Home" The Field Museum in 1997.
• Two local playwrights adapted Feldman and Stall's book The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents' Activism in Chicago Public Housing, into a two-act play, The Neighborhood Fight. This play has been enacted in two public venues and will be featured in the Illinois Humanities Festival during the fall of 2006.

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