This dissertation is a study of the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative (HCBI), a current program run by the city of Chicago to stabilize a type of city housing. The HCBI advocates and guides home repair projects for Chicago Bungalow owners. Most Chicago Bungalows are located in a belt between the inner city and suburbs; over 80,000 bungalows were built in this semi-circular band between 1910 and 1940. The HCBI was launched in response to the physical decline of bungalow neighborhoods but this project argues that its architectural codes respond more directly to the deterioration of the Bungalow Belt as a conceptual landscape. More specifically, the Initiative's architectural guidelines attempt to revive the Bungalow Belt's mythic status as a place of strong, family-oriented communities of similar inhabitants.; It is this association with uniformity and collectivity that accounts for the Initiative's choice of home improvement as a mechanism for architectural and social change. The Initiative does not fund or approve all home improvements, and the Initiative's guidelines closely follow historic preservation guidelines. Thus, the dissertation asks whether home improvement corresponds better with the Initiative's social, rather than aesthetic, goals. It also closely examines the way in which the Initiative's aesthetic goals correspond with traditional historic preservation programs, and why the Initiative chose home improvement funding over preservation planning. This study of a program that promotes home improvement contributes to a small but growing scholarship on the history of home improvement. Contemporary case studies like this one are important because they permit a study of how domestic advice is used and rejected by homeowners, and not just of the advice itself.; This study relies heavily on interviews with current bungalow owners and home improvers and is above all interested in the advice users. However, it also closely examines the rhetoric of the HCBI's domestic advice. It argues that in focusing on the desired goals of the program - a socially energized and architecturally cohesive Bungalow Belt - the Initiative missed a number of opportunities to include bungalow owners in the process.
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