Emplacing Risks in the City: Class, Politics, Risk, and the Built Environment of Women’s Residential Clubs, 1896

Residential clubs for women in Progressive Era urban America offered protection against risks in the city. This article is an investigation into the relationship between perceptions of risk, built environments, class, and political ideology at two such clubs in Chicago. I merge theories of risk with Bourdieu’s notions of fields, symbolic violence, and symbolic labor to establish two new concepts: risk ideology and risk emplacement. Risk ideologies are sets of ideas about what and where is dangerous. Risk emplacement is the process through which social actors align risk ideologies with certain places and places with particular risks. I argue that these concepts address a general concern in urban history: how built environments organize populations and how aesthetic concerns are distinct from—yet often work to reproduce—class and political ideologies