Here you will find articles about land use, zoning, the City Beautiful movement, subdivision design, parks, and transportation, illustrated mostly by cases in Chicago and Springfield and published mainly in Planning, the Chicago Reader, Chicago Enterprise, and Illinois Times. 

 

I can't remember when I became interested in how cities work. I suppose it dates to the slow death of my home town's downtown (which for eleven years also happened to be my neighborhood) in the 1970s. The perceptive reader will recognize in me the loving son who became a bore about fitness and nutrition after watching a beloved parent die of a heart attack.

 

In any event, urban issues were to become a professional preoccupation. The first opinion piece published in Illinois Times under my own name was about the promiscuous clearing of downtown commercial buildings for parking lots. My first piece for Illinois Issues magazine, in 1978, was about urban planning, specifically developer exactions being imposed by the Chicago suburb of Naperville. (The piece is of little interest today and is not included in this archives.) Developers of the day raged about how this clumsy manipulation of market forces by government would throttle growth; I take pleasure in pointing out here that in the years since, Naperville grew from 42,000 residents to 148,000.   

 

An occasional contributor to the early Illinois Times was Ruth Eckdish Knack. She moved to Chicago and took a job as an editor at Planning, the monthly published by the American Planning Association, the professional organization for urban planners. Ruth (now a member of the College of Fellows of  the American Institute of Certified Planners) kindly tossed assignments my way, and I began to acquire an education in urbanism and planning, article by article, my tuition in effect being paid by the APA. I suppose I should have declared that on my 1040s.

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Funny how a freelancer, by stint of publishing a well-researched piece in which he or she interviews experts about a topic about which he is otherwise ignorant, gets a reputation as a authority by virtue of his work appearing in a journal considered authoritative. I got used to it, but I never didn't laugh when I saw a piece of mine on this topic on a university reading list. 

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Interested readers also should know that I devoted two chapters in my history of mid-Illinois—"A Classic Mixing Zone" and "Town Mania"—to population demographics and migration and urbanization as they affected that part of the state; see Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves.