on Divergent:

reimagining Chicago's dystopian future (including the South Side in it)

context

    Divergent is a 2010's YA novel set in a dystopian Chicago.

    It divided all of Chicago up into five factions:

    1. Erudite
    2. Amity,
    3. Dauntless
    4. Candor
    5. Abnegation

    They were spread across the city, each claiming a part of it as their own.

    But! "Spread across the city", in this case, translates to "spread across the white parts of the city". It's hard to get an exact map-- the author, Veronica Roth, never published an official copy-- but there are enough street names and landmarks that we can figure it out.

Baby's First Map

Two notes.

One: the outlined area is a very approximate mapping of the turf Divergent covers. (We'll get more specific later).

Two: the shaded segments are, as the legend suggests, Chicago's current racial distribution.

Combine these, and you're left with the realization that Divergent is NOT interested in the West or South sides. Divergent's Chicago is the Loop and the North Side. Nothing more.

So, Divergent is white. Anyone acquainted with the series-- the movies especially-- probably didn't need me to tell them that. Look at the casting.

But this is a mapping project. It does not suffice to say "hey, look how white this series is". Instead, the question is "hey, how could this have been done better?"

(But this is, again, a mapping project. I am not suggesting an alternate cast list. I am looking at the landmarks, real and invented, that Divergent uses to invoke Chicago into its setting. I am suggesting an alternate landmark list. Real and invented.)

Teen's First Map

Additions to the legend:

    The big hunk of green up north (the outlined semicircle) is the Amity faction. They're farmers. All we're explicitly told is that they're really far away, so here are the justifications for their placement.
    1. They're the closest faction to O'Hare (this is relevant) and they're at the end of a train line. Makes sense-- they've got to transport food to the other factions.
    2. The 90 (Kennedy Expressway) travels through their borders.

    I think this is pretty solid.

Next faction: the teal ones, Candor. They're lawyers, pretty much. Their headquarters are in the Merchandise Mart, so it's pretty clear where they are.

West of them (the grey rectangle) is Abnegation, the civil servants. We know that they're north of the Factionless zone (the big circle-- more on that later), and that their HQ is near Humboldt Park, at the intersection of North and Fairfield. They, too, are close to the 90. So this one is locked in.

The blue is Erudite. They're the evil guys calling the shots; their turf is Millennium Park; their HQ is the library. You get it.

The olive green little bit is the common grounds. They've got Sears Tower and Buckingham Fountain. That's all.

The red, south of them, is Dauntless. These guys are the violent ones. Locating them is hard-- all we have to go on is that they're a thirty minute train ride south of downtown, which is very vague. Their HQ isn't a discernible landmark, either-- it's a series of tunnels. There is a tunnel network in this area, though! The Chicago Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (pinned in the red area in a later map-- be patient!) is well within this area.

On the Factionless:

The Factionless are the ones in the big, empty circle. The bus route connecting Abnegation to Candor to Erudite skirts their borders; they are, again, south of Abnegation. It's pretty easy to place them.

Why are they so big? They're by far the largest group, and they're thinly spread across the city. This is a conservative estimate.

What's their purpose?

The Factionless map almost perfectly onto stereotypes of homeless people. The only one we see in book one is starving, sexually threatening, and physically violent. They are also the only faction (besides the bottom edge of the Dauntless) mapped onto a non-white area. Hm.

The Dauntless

  1. Given the probable location of their headquarters, I probably drew Dauntless a little far south. 30 minutes by train means a little bit less in a dilapidated transit system-- these trains are slow enough that the Dauntless just jump out of them.
  2. Making the violent faction (trained how to kill, used as cops, etc) is the South Side faction is really not a great look.

The Dauntless, as they currently are, are a shallow stereotyping of the South Side that barely extends into the South Side in the first place. And the story does not engage with the actual South Side, either-- every real landmark it describes is in the Loop or northwards. Here's that list.

Landmarks, both Real and Not

A quick rundown. Green pins are real landmarks, purple pins are invented.

Northmost green: the Hancock Building. Has a zipline at the top.

Green in the teal (Candor): Merchandise Mart. Renamed Merciless Mart, because lawyers live in it, and because this book has no taste.

Green in the blue (Erudite): the Bean. Other Millennium Park landmarks, too, but I didn't want to clog the map.

Green in the faded green: the Sears Tower. Renamed the Hub. It's common ground.

Eastmost green: Navy Pier. It's the same, really.

And now for the purples! There are fewer of these, because Divergent's Chicago has stagnated, and also because inventing landmarks is work.

Purple in the red (Dauntless): the Chicago Tunnel and Reservoir construction I was talking about.

Purple in the grey (Abnegation): Abnegation HQ. Nothing stands out about it, really.

Purple all the way by O'Hare (not pictured): the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. This is plot stuff; we don't need to get into it.

And that's about all! Divergent is not particularly concerned with place. But it could be. Here's a Divergent that looks to actually engage with the South Side.

New Landmarks!

Same legend as before. The bigger green pins are real places, the bigger purple ones are not.

Northeastmost green (the one by the coast): the grave of Stephen Douglas. Not that I expect (or particularly want) Divergent to talk about his debate with Lincoln. The Dauntless faction, where the main character was trained, simply does not have burial rites. The funeral happens around the corpse, and then it's disposed of. This landmark provides an opportunity to wonder at why they do it that way, why huge pillars commemorate forgotten men, and how she will be remembered when she dies. (Because she does, you know, die.)

West of that is Crown Hall, a famous modernist piece of collegiate architecture. The Mecca, a tenement for black residents and famous in its own right, was destroyed to make room for it. With all the themes of destruction and renewal and the grinding into the dirt of certain peoples-- Divergent ends with a literal genocide-- there is much to talk about, here. I'd bring it in in the second book, so she can use it to wonder about the prejudiced destruction happening in her own time.

The green on 51st st (northmost of the three greens down south) is the KAM Isaiah Israel temple, the oldest synagogue in Chicago. Divergent is the kind of book that's Christian, in a vague and timeless sense-- half the cast is passively Christian, and the other half doesn't talk about it. Sometimes, people pray. It's always to the Christian God. If Divergent wants to talk about discrimination, prejudice, and genocide, it can't remove all of Chicago's religious diversity without saying why. My vote-- just include it. This is a beautiful building.

The green on 57th st is my only UChicago submission (promise!)-- Pile 1. This world is apocalyptic for various nuclear reasons, and the evil people calling the shots-- the Erudites-- share a lot of intellectual similarities with UChicago and the Manhattan project. This one writes itself.

The eastmost green is the Museum of Science and Industry. I'm not particularly interested in that part, though, because it's also one of the last buildings standing from the 1893 World's Fair. That's older than anything Divergent encounters. What would the main character think, to see something so indulgent and cultural and fun? Her world is, ultimately, few of those things.

The northmost purple is the site of the murder that prompted the 1919 race riots. A black man wandered onto a segregated beach and got murdered for it.

Again, if you're going to talk about genocide, this is relevant. The reason why this one is purple instead of green is because I can't actually find a memorial commemorating this. If it exists, it's not on the internet.

So! This is the perfect place for Divergent to take a less stagnant look at how cities grow and change. Perhaps, with the increasing amount of faction wars (and the race wars that lead to the apocalypse, though that is much too plotty), Chicago's factionless built a memorial here. It could be nice.

And the last two purples are related. Divergent does not engage with the South Side, so how will its characters get there? A sizable chunk of the sequel takes place in Amity, the farming faction to the north. Pretty much the only details that give it place are "it's near O'Hare" and "it's on the Brown Line", and neither of those are essential to its character. Move it south! Put it in these parks! Have them tear up streets to use for growing!

The Red and Green lines connect to the rest of the factions, anyways. If Amity is supposed to be about kindness and renewal-- and if the only other South Side faction is the murder cops, Dauntless-- moving Amity here and positioning them as the South Side community is radical, and original, and lovely.