Fifth City

The Fifth City Human Development Project, a 16 block area located on Chicago’s West Side, is located some four miles directly west of Chicago’s Loop. In 1963, the Ecumenical Institute moved to East Garfield Park, which at that time had high crime and unemployment, abandoned housing units, inadequate public services, deteriorating schools and virtually no locally owned businesses. There was little access to healthy foods and an absence of opportunities for any kind of meaningful civic involvement. The staff with community residents researched the overwhelming problems faced in the community and set out to develop a comprehensive plan to address them.

The 5th City Project was to be a model and a demonstration for developing authentic human community across the planet. It would be comprehensive, capable of addressing every aspect of the economic, political and cultural life present in any community. At the same time, the decisions and actions of the local people would provide the specific content and direction of the community. The staff role was to be a catalyst, enabling the community to determine what changes it wanted and how it would go about achieving them. Finally, the methods used to engage the community in making and implementing those decisions would need to be applicable in local communities everywhere.

At a time when many communities were adopting a more confrontational and adversarial approach to motivating people, the 5th City Project charted a cooperative and collaborative course. Fifth citizens formulated a shared and attractive vision of their desired future, identified the blocks to that vision and developed long and short range plans for bringing it into being. The Institute assigned members of its own staff to work in the community on a daily basis, alongside 5th City’s existing and emerging leadership.

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5th City first took its name from 5th Avenue, the northern boundary of the community. Later, the name came to symbolically refer to any community that made a comparable decision to assume full responsibility for its own future. Five fundamental principles or presuppositions defined what came to be seen as distinctive features of the 5th City approach:

1. Delimited Geographical Area: A way to clearly delineate the physical boundaries of the project was essential to the comprehensive approach. It fostered a strong sense of community identity in which the whole community could participate, reducing the sense of chaos created by the seeming impossible task and enabled a clearer picture of the maze of problems to emerge. It curtailed the dissipation of energies and made it possible for the project to reach to the last citizen.

2. All the Problems: Every issue facing the community needed to be acknowledged and addressed simultaneously.. Piecemeal approaches spread out over a long time frame would fail to get at the real issues and would not create the needed morale for action. Indeed, such approaches tended to cultivate negativity. Problems reinforce one another, and in order to move one problem toward significant solution, it was necessary to move them all. This meant developing an analysis of all the problems in order to understand their interrelatedness and make it clear how they mutually supported one another. From that perspective, and by targeting and focusing on the major underlying contradictions of the community which this revealed, it was possible to impact all the problems of the community at once through the actions that were taken.

3. All the People: Every person and every age level had to be involved, and right away. Just as community problems reinforce one another, so the postures of the various age groups powerfully influence each other. If the elders were neglected, they could communicate images of hopelessness and submissiveness to the young. If one group decided to do something, its members would find they needed the support of the rest of the community to be effective. To form an authentic community identity, all the people had to have the opportunity to participate in a significant way in the decision making that would shape their destiny.

4. The Depth Human Problem: This was the single, most critical reality that had to be dealt with immediately and forever after. In distressed communities, it is always some form of self depreciating and thus debilitating image of oneself and one’s community. Every person and every people operate out of a deep seated self-image. Practical actions result from that interior image and the self talk that accompanies it. When one’s self-­understanding is of being a second-rate human being, that one cannot succeed or is not worthy of success, very little can be accomplished. This recognition was at the root of everything that had to change, with all else resting on it. Unless the imagination of the citizens was somehow refurbished or recreated, nothing else would be lastingly altered. Images of authentic self-esteem had to come into being in order to release the needed motivation, courage and creativity that reformulating a community required.

5. Symbols are Key: Everything that happened in the community would ride on the power of symbols. Symbols include songs, celebrations, festivals ,rituals, recognition of accomplishments and the graphic image of the geographical area itself, along with its distinguishing name, landmarks, art pieces, stories, rites, statues, flags and insignia, its leaders, heroes and respected persons. These things were foundational to inclusive social change because they were essential to reshaping the existing images of self-depreciation.

An effort that deals with a substantial body of people depends on symbols. In creating any community, large or small, a sense of commonness in mission must be developed. A commitment to its corporate task defines a community, and this is mediated through living symbols that are crucial to the morale and expectation in people. These symbols make the difference between ongoing social despair and fresh, creative energy. In 5th City, they had to permeate every principle, model, strategy and structure of the reformulation effort.

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This sixteen block area of Chicago known as 5th City would quickly become a globally recognized community development project. The symbol of the Iron Man, the ‘pillar of iron’ erected by the community to depict people standing tall in the midst of adversity, would find its way into rural villages from India and Kenya to Australia and Venezuela. Its story would inspire community initiatives across the United States and in dozens of countries where grassroots people undertook their own renewal efforts. It would be held up as an exemplar for urban renewal by Chicago mayors and become the subject of documentaries, narrated by Oprah Winfrey, Ben Kingsley and Richard Attenborough. The community, over the years, would host and provide tours for visitors from many other countries. In the late 1960s the preschool would be recognized as one of the ten top Headstart preschools in the United States for its innovative approaches to early learning and helping to instill images of self worth in its young people.

The methods and models developed, tested and refined in 5th City became the touchstone for all the Institute’s future work in building community. The work in 5th City was the basis for the more than 5,000 Town Meetings held during the US Bicentennial and for the hundreds of Human Development projects subsequently launched in rural village communities around the world. Its participatory methods and approach to strategic thinking and planning helped give shape to the new form of group leadership known as facilitation and was the basis for the formation of the International Association of Facilitators and the Technology of Participation (ToP) twenty years later.

The 5th City Project was a venture in organizing and changing a particular neighborhood in urban Chicago, but it was always much more than that. Its model of what a fully functioning human community could look like was breathtaking in its comprehensive vision. The reports and stories of what its people had accomplished catalyzed the creativity and motivation of many far beyond the city of Chicago. 5th Citizens, wherever on the planet they might show up, would be marked not by always having phenomenal success in turning around their distressed communities, but by having been themselves transformed in and through their collective effort. They would be people living out of a profound yes to their own lives and the communities where they chose to pour their lives..

Fifth City Stories Today

5th City Revisited, a play by Meida McNeal wrote in 2019, tells the story of 5th City in its community development days of the 60s and 70s and what has happened to it in years since and raising questions about where the community wants to go next. Meida, the daughter of Judy Gritzmacher and George McNeal, was born in 5th City and attended the 5th City preschool and now has an art company and works for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Meida was interviewed by the Newberry Library regarding telling the 5th City story:  “Signs of Creative Resistance:  Chicago’s Fifth City Movement”. McNeal, Meida presents “Fifth City Revisited”2023 and here in 2019

Denise Gathings, a Chicago police officer and daughter of Ruth Carter, wrote and directed My Soul Cries Out: Stop! and here about gang violence. One of the play’s productions was held at ICA GreenRise May, 2017.

5th City Iron Man Plaza:  Placemaking in East Garfield Park, Chicago Department of Transportation, 2017

Jean Loomis tells the history of the Iron Man statue that she designed, and shares this photo taken at its unveiling in 1968.