Green Chicago

Can Chicago be one of America’s “greenest” cities? To those whose image of the city involves the glint of morning sun on a forest of skyscrapers, the turbocharged mid-day diesel roar at yet another grade crossing, the torrent of cars pooling behind an afternoon “gaper’s block” on the Dan Ryan Expressway, or the nocturnal sniff and glimpse of hell in the mills and refineries of the Calumet district, it seems hardly possible that the answer could be yes. But visitors to Chicago can barely miss the signs that the city is committed to an image makeover. Geographers will have a number of opportunities to enjoy the fruits of what the city has tried to do as well as to inquire into the nature of the reality behind the image. One thing that has not changed about Chicago is that even in its bid to be more “green,” questions of power and politics lurk at every turn.

Greener Paths
“Chicago Gateway Green” signs have sprouted seemingly everywhere along expressway embankments. Thousands of trees and flowerbeds have been planted in a determined effort to “soften” the look of the approach to town (www.gatewaygreen.org). Since the mid-1990s, many of Chicago’s broadest streets have been “boulevarded,” with newly constructed medians holding planters, flowers, and trees. Historic boulevards already in place have also been attended to, and given their location, it is clear that the effort is not simply to impress visitors, but to prime the pump of real estate values in some fairly depressed neighborhoods. Many of the new and old boulevards have been treated to new period lighting fixtures, and, after decades of “overlighting” its streets, the city commissioned a lighting plan for its downtown area that exchanged maximum overall lumens for task appropriate light.

Showcase Parks
Nowhere has the city’s effort to be self-evidently “green” been more obvious than in two highly visible downtown parks: Millennium Park and Northerly Island. Millennium Park, just one block east of the AAG’s convention hotel, the Palmer House Hilton, has been touted by Mayor Richard M. Daley as the “largest public-private park” in the nation. It sits on 24.5 acres of railroad air rights on top of an enormous garage (revenues from the garage repay the bonds). Some exceedingly high profile public art sculptures and spaces, including a Frank Gehry-designed outdoor music theatre and connecting bridge, as well as its location have contributed to the park’s instant popularity with visitors (www.millenniumpark.org).
Northerly Island is a touch farther from the madding crowds of Millennium Park, just south of the “Museum Campus” about a mile and half southeast of the Palmer House. A “Northerly Island Coalition,” formed by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and including such longtime environmental stalwarts as the Openlands Project, Friends of the Parks, and the Chicago Audubon Societyis are eager see the park’s full development as a nature sanctuary but for now the Park District has allowed a temporary music pavilion at the site for three to five years. Revenues from concerts will fund park development. (See www.charteronepavilion.com)

Green Roofs and Buildings
Two projects in particular suggest that the city’s commitment to something more “green” goes beyond enhanced tourism opportunities. High profile “green” projects don’t get much higher than the roof of City Hall, completed in 2001 and one of the nation’s more well-known “green roofs.” It is designed to lower building energy costs, reduce contributions to the urban heat island, and increase oxygen in the local environment. Beehives have been established; the city now sells honey in the main corridor of City Hall. There are as many as eighty other green roofs in the city now.
Research into green roofs and other path-breaking architectural ideas is conducted and modeled at the Center for Green Technology (“Green Tech”) on the west side. Built to the highest standards of green architecture, “Green Tech” was awarded a LEED Platinum rating by the U.S. Green Building Council (the highest possible rating) and was awarded a Top Ten Green award by the American Institute of Architects in 2003.
Visitors to the AAG meeting will have the opportunity to take a field trip to both City Hall and the Center for Green Technology. Key Department of Environment staff will be present on the tour to discuss these and the many other initiatives that can be found in the Mayor’s Environmental Action Agenda at the department website (www.egov.cityofchicago.org).

Sustainable Calumet
In 1995, Craig Colten and I led a tour of the industrial Calumet region on the city’s southeast side called “Toxic Chicago.” One measure of change in the region is that such tours are now more aptly called “Toxics to Treasures” tours and are led by full-time staff of the Southeast Environmental Task Force.
Mayor Daley, who a dozen years earlier had seriously proposed solving the region’s problems by simply burying them under international airport runways, has done an about face. The city has completed a Calumet Land Use Plan that has more or less settled longstanding disagreements about the fate of particular parcels, determining if plots should have industrial, open space, residential, landfill, or other uses. The city and the state have also signed an intergovernmental agreement to resolve landownership issues and to develop a Calumet Open Space Reserve. And nowhere is the Mayor’s about face more clearly registered than in the plans for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center. Intended to showcase the regional turnaround, the center, designed by Chicago’s Studio Gang architects, uses recycled steel from the region to form a nest-like framework, echoing the region’s role as important bird habitat (www.studiogang.net/projects/pages/ford.htm). A field trip to the Calumet region will visit the center site.
There is also a proposal being promoted by the Southeast Environmental Task Force to restore an abandoned coke plant as a labor and industrial history museum and to extend the Illinois and Michigan Canal Heritage Corridor through the district. The task force, works in partnership with the Field Museum of Natural History, which in 2004, received the AAG’s “Web Site of the Year” award for the website “Journey Through Calumet” (www.fieldmuseum.org/calumet/).
Though much work has been done in the Calumet through coalition and consensus conflict is always just around the corner. Battle lines have been drawn with the recent proposal to expand sanitary landfills in the region, though landfilling seems to be among the few remaining viable industries in the region due to economic shifts and seriously contaminated land. At least one field trip at the conference will offer the opportunity to investigate these issues by visiting the sites as well as meeting leaders of the various interested groups.

Brownfields
Chicago won national attention for its Brownfields Forum, established in 1993, which sought specific policy solutions to the problem of “development proof” abandoned industrial sites. Bankers, speculators, industrial developers, environmental regulators, community activists, and others helped shape a new Illinois law that geared the level of cleanup to the future land use of the site. Some very high profile sites seemed headed for redevelopment, but as might be expected, the places that had the best market factors for other reasons (like the former Santa Fe yards near Chinatown) were far better positioned for redevelopment than those that did not (like the nearly two miles of lakefront on the far south side that once housed U.S. Steel’s sprawling South Works.) But even here, Chicago has shown an interesting willingness to experiment. Mud dredged from the bottom of Peoria Lake in downstate Illinois Chicago has been barged back up to the USX site to form a two to three foot topsoil layer over the previously inhospitable slag that covered the site. This project will also be on the Calumet field trip.

The Color of Green
Organizations like People for Community Recovery, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, and Healthy South Chicago, have pushed uphill against a variety of environmental issues from toxic emissions, to public transit shutdowns, to access to nutrition. On specific issues like these organizers have met success. But major challenges obviously remain. People in Chicago’s lower income neighborhoods have a lot else on their plate to feel that concerns of the traditional environmental community like “prairie rehabilitation” have anything remotely to do with them. And in any case, “prairie” in the old Chicago neighborhood vernacular simply means “empty lot.” Field trips will visit with local organizers and discuss with them the continuing challenges they face.

Chicago Wilderness
In 2001, the American Planning Association gave its Outstanding Plan Award to the Chicago Regional Biodiversity Council (better known as “Chicago Wilderness”) for its biodiversity recovery plan. Chicago Wilderness (www.chicagowilderness.org) now includes more than 170 municipalities, museums, zoos, schools, and agencies, and has as its core mission the effort to restore the region’s native landscapes especially through building broad public awareness and stewardship.
The Chicago Wilderness effort is increasingly visible on the region’s landscape, especially in some prairie-oak savannas of the region’s forest preserve system. Landscape restoration efforts have sprouted in a variety of unlikely places as well, on college and corporate campuses, in city parks, and sometimes, in the vernacular “prairies” of the neighborhoods.

Clean Air Counts and Conservation Design
While advocating city-centered “smart-growth” efforts, Mayor Daley has also expanded his reach into the suburbs through the creation of the Metropolitan Mayor’s Caucus, which in turn spawned the “Clean Air Counts” campaign. The campaign encourages individual homeowners, corporations, and municipalities to take steps to voluntarily reduce air emissions through activities such as native landscaping (www.cleanaircounts.org).
Several new suburban developments that feature “conservation design” or “new urbanism” principles have also been developed in the Chicago region. (Chicago is the headquarters of the Council on New Urbanism). The most well known of these is Prairie Crossing at the intersection of two commuter rail lines in the distant north suburbs (www.prairiecrossing.com). A field trip to Prairie Crossing will investigate how new urbanism principles were actualized on greenfields miles from city neighborhoods.

Nurture’s Metropolis
What many of these projects, plans, parks, sites, notions, dreams, and realities add up to is still not completely clear. Chicago is caught in an increasingly competitive global game of chance, where “quality of life” factors have the power to make or break the city’s position in the urban hierarchy. On this view, the “green gambit” is smart play, and other cities are looking over Chicago’s shoulder as it garners excellent press and attention.
But the city is also impressive for the sheer numbers of people who are in environmental work for the “use value.” They see that, little by little, the city’s former nature, buried by development, might be nurtured back to life. This story is exceedingly well told in the new PBS series “Edens Lost and Found,” and viewing it before you visit would be excellent preparation for your trip (www.edenslostandfound.org/program/chicago/index.html).

Mark Bouman
mbouman@csu.edu

Please direct all queries to:

Association of American Geographers 1710 16th Street NW,br> Washington, DC 20009 Voice: (202) 234-1450 Fax: (202) 234-2744 E-mail: meeting@aag.org