Robert Giloth, who had been a community organizer in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, returned from PhD studies at Cornell in 1985 to assume the directorship of the Research and Development (R&D) Division within Robert Mier's Department of Economic Development. R&D was a unit free of service responsibilities; Giloth called it a "free space" and it was well situated to undertake studies of neighborhood initiated projects and interests: it undertook "collaborative special projects and problem solving with community groups [on] loan funds, resource recycling demonstrations, plant closing responses, business incubators, worker buyouts, and industry plans." Giloth suggests case studies in several of these topics.