You said to have them incorporate their own city. This seems different?

> There is no meaningful contrast between the two phrases.

Sure there is: in these cases, there is no single well-defined all-encompassing goal, and it may not be possible to define one.

Everyone in a polity (a town or region or nation or perhaps special district) should be free to vote for every candidate running for that polity. The polity should have no geographic sub-divisions. If, as was mentioned above, a neighborhood in Chicago has a special culture, then:

its residents have their city concerns met when they participate in city elections,

and they have their regional concerns met when they participate in regional elections,

and they have their national concerns met when they participate in national elections.

But if you decided that their culture was so special, and deserved so much special protection, that the above was not good enough, then my suggestion is that the neighborhood should incorporate as its own city. Instead of being a neighborhood in Chicago, it should be an independent city with its own elections.

As I said, if you really wanted to rescue some unique neighborhood, my suggestion is that you do so directly, without trying to achieve the effect as the accidental side effect of an unrelated architectural decision.

I was referring to Thomas's goals. What does Thomas want to do? What is he trying to achieve? Whatever his goal is, he should approach that directly, without relying on accidental side effects of unrelated architectural decisions.

What’s the next step, then?

"But what's really happening there is that there are in fact very well-defined Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, and the earmuffs capture a bunch of them neatly: Pilsen, Little Village, Cicero, Belmont-Cragin. If you know Chicago, you know these places, and you also know what the boundary between, say, Belmont-Cragin and North Austin is like; however artificial it looks on a map, it is a real border. That these communities are where they are is also not purely happenstance: a lot of very unfortunate social engineering took place in the early-mid-20th century to put those neighborhoods (and all the other neighborhoods) where they are now."

Assuming his goal is to protect the unique culture of that neighborhood, two options are:

1. the neighborhood already has its unique culture protected because the people in that neighborhood help elect the city government

2. the unique culture of the neighborhood is not sufficiently protected by the city government, therefore the neighborhood should incorporate and so become its own independent city

Again, whatever Thomas's goal is, I'd suggest that he achieve his goal directly, rather than trying to achieve the result as the accidental side effect of other architectural decisions. Gerrymandering is a very weak way of trying to defend the culture of a neighborhood. If his goal is to protect the culture of the neighborhood, then he should think of an architecture that would do so directly.

No option is clean.

Why should Thomas do something direct if something indirect achieves his goal, if a little bit less, but with far fewer harms?

Direct is not always better than indirect, especially in domains where any direct action has myriad indirect effects too.