The article examines how the entrepreneurial municipal government in Chicago, IL has deployed tax increment financing revenues to realize so-called urban education reform through the construction of exclusive neoliberal schools. At the same time traditional open enrollment schools are relatively deprived of tax increment financing revenues for school construction projects. In effect, Chicago’s municipal government is allotted the financial flexibility by the tax increment financing program to construct a variegated, unequal and polarized school system consisting of well funded, high quality exclusive public schools and underfunded, lower quality open enrollment public schools. Further, the placement of exclusive schools is also polarized as prestigious selective enrollment public schools are located in high socio-economic neighborhoods and partially privatized charter and contract schools, outside of local democratic control, are located in predominantly African-American low socio-economic neighborhoods, thus disempowering these residents.

In this article, we explore how global infrastructure investment funds and actors are financialising the local growth machine in Chicago, and how Chicago’s transforming growth machine uses its influence to financialise urban governance policy goals and institutional arrangements. We view global infrastructure investors through the lens of place entrepreneurs seeking to extract monopoly rents from urban infrastructure. As place entrepreneurs, global infrastructure investors have an interest in forming alliances with other place entrepreneurs to generate political and institutional capacity for infrastructure financialisation. Our case study examines the concrete and specific ways in which global financial firms and actors work in partnership with Chicago’s business civic organisation, World Business Chicago, to shape the City of Chicago’s planning processes and orchestrate a more mature institutional-regulatory infrastructure investment environment through the formation of the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, the city’s public–private partnership infrastructure bank.

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Differences in how individuals navigate and interact with physical space have clear implications for when and where they are exposed to environmental characteristics. To address this reality, we propose and test a novel method with a sample of Chicago adolescents that links individual GPS coordinates with locations of environmental characteristics as a strategy to increase precision in the measurement of environmental exposures. We use exposure to violent crime as an example and link the GPS coordinates of 51 youth collected over a one‐week period during the summer of 2016 to locations and times of violent crime. We explore different spatial and temporal parameters to determine whether an exposure occurred. Using the 660‐foot (201 m), 24‐hour operationalization, we found that youth were exposed to a total of 126 violent crimes, with an average of 3.82 (SD = 3.24) per respondent. This was higher than the 12 that were identified when exposure was calculated as the number of violent crimes occurring within 660 feet (201 m) of youths’ residential addresses during the week‐long assessment period. Examining correlations between the different exposure variables and measures of youths’ psychological functioning, we found the largest relationships when using the GPS‐based indices. We present a strategy for measuring exposure to environmental characteristics using GPS data. Higher rates of crime exposure are found based on GPS coordinates than with residential address. GPS‐based exposure measures are related to youths' psychological functioning.

TikTok™, a social media platform popular with teenagers and young adults, hosts a variety of short‐form user videos with durations from 15 s to 10 min. Among these videos are potentially dangerous “challenges,” such as the “Skull Breaker” challenge and the “Benadryl” challenge. Benadryl (diphenhydramine) is an over‐the‐counter medication with potential for misuse in both suicidal and recreational purposes. We report the case of a 14‐year‐old girl who reportedly ingested an unknown amount of diphenhydramine while taking part in a TikTok™ social media challenge. Autopsy revealed marked bilateral pulmonary congestion and edema, as well as a bright pink granular material within the esophagus, stomach, duodenum, and proximal jejunum. A postmortem femoral blood sample result identified a lethal blood concentration of diphenhydramine (49,658 ng/ml). Physicians and other healthcare providers need to be aware of social media trends that may pose public health threats. Teenagers are a particularly susceptible group and need to be informed of the risks associated with these “challenges.” For the forensics field, a knowledge of and process for accessing social media platforms can be critical for investigating deaths. Given the extremely elevated concentration of diphenhydramine in this case, a knowledge of circumstances of death, the scene, and social media trends can assist the forensic pathologist in determining the correct manner of death—accident versus suicide.