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A Year For City Ideas in Chicago

Posted by: Nate Berg

13 January 2009 - 10:00am

Chicago's 100-year anniversary of the Daniel Burnham city plan offers an opportunity to rethink how the city works and how it should look for the next 100, according to this piece from Blair Kamin.

"Specifically, 2009 could make a historic mark because it will give the residents of Chicago and its vast metropolitan area a chance to start a civic conversation about how we live, how we grow and whether the mass suburban sprawl of the last few decades still makes sense in the era of declining fossil fuel supplies and global warming. There's a marvelous excuse to have this conversation. The region will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest city plans in history."

"The plan's centennial, then, all but invites new forms of visionary thinking, even if the document and the extraordinary results it achieved set a daunting standard. And what sort of thinking is bubbling around?"

"In a word, it's green -- a color-coded vision that, like Burnham's utopian "White City" of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, thoroughly reflects the urban aspirations of its time."

Full Story: Planning for Chicago's future requires Burnham-style vision--and a big pair of green-tinted glasses
Source: Chicago Tribune, January 12, 2009
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The areas where we have severe blight and indications of more blight to come are basically the same as they ever were. How in the world are we ever going to move our community development selves into an alternative future that thinks differently about the challenges we face in our cities and low-income suburban and rural communities?
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