Chicagoland urban issues

As I explain elsewhere on this site, I made my living mostly writing for a handful of national magazines. One of these was Planning, the glossy monthly published by the American Planning Association from their national offices in Chicago. Those assignments left me alert to local developments in zoning, transit, urban renewal and other forms of redevelopment, infrastructure, traffic engineering, and the like. Some of the resulting pieces were not about urban planning per se, but urbanism figured centrally in all of them.

As I also explain somewhere, I was never much enamored of the city’s Chicago-ness, I nevertheless relished its big-city-ness. Chicago is a very American city whose political culture encouraged the leaving of the building of the city to profit-seeking developers. Chicago did tackle the much trickier challenge of designing the city in the 1908 Plan of Chicago, but that effort failed in its larger ambitions and nothing so grand was ever attempted again.

The spirit of the 1980 plan burned briefly again in the Chicago of the 1990s. Mayor Richard M. Daley traveled, unlike his father, and came back to Chicago with half-digested plans to turn Chicago into Paris. Chicago began a series of initiatives to restore the Chicago River to the life of the city, to redevelop massive tracts of abandoned or under-used industrial land near the city center, to restore its magnificent park system, to turn its rackety el system into another Metro.

Some of these ideas were good—the Loop circulator—but most (the Block 37 superstation, the Olympics bid, Millennium Park) were misconceived or impracticable. Chicago had the advantage of being able to learn from the experience, good and bad, of other cities that had undertaken such projects, but it was an advantage that too often was wasted. Daley fils wasted billions, and while he turned the city center into a tourist’s delight he failed to achieve basic improvements for the people who lived there. It gave me lots to write about, anyway.

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