Chicago is a huge place and it's not easily described. Despite the daunting nature of this task, I'll give it a try here. The image below is from Wikimedia Commons.
Chicago is a vibrant and thriving city--not without its problems--that offers many lessons about cities to even the casual observer.
The massiveness of Chicago is somewhat awkwardly connected by buses operated by CTA and PACE, city operated elevated trains (the 'L'), regionally operated commuter trains (Metra) and a highway system that I would consider comparatively un-obtrusive. While the 'L' is incredibly effective at whisking urban residents to and from downtown, it is a terribly time consuming way to go anywhere else. The 'L' allows many urban residents to have a sufficient, but not satisfactory, level of mobility without an automobile. The bus system is simply too slow and unreliable to totally eliminate the usefulness of automobiles.
The layout of the city was greatly influenced by the illustrious planner Daniel Burnham whose work, The Plan of Chicago, laid out a vision of vast parks and wide boulevards. The City Beautiful movement, which Burnham lead, envisioned the break-up of active commerce in a city and a "return" to more leisurely endeavors like walks in a park. Chicago adopted three main elements of the plan, boulevards, enormous parks, and concentrated public expenditures. The boulevards--some well over 200 feet wide--are a greatly respected Chicago tradition. The realities of modern-day traffic patterns however, turn them into small highways instead of the leisurely drive through the park they were intended to be.
The older part of Chicago is ringed with some of the biggest urban parks in the world. They were created to provide respite to a population suffering from the horrific conditions of the stockyards and other unregulated industries of the late 19th century. Chicago has maintained the tradition of these enormous parks by adding Millennium Park--built above an old rail yard--to the already expansive block of parks downtown.
I don't have any qualms with parks in general but scale is critical. Parks of the magnitude dictated by Burnham are so large that they can only be filled by expensive city programming that often falls away during difficult economic times. Parks like these are never full and often totally unoccupied. The lack of watchful eyes leads to parks that fall into lawlessness. Humboldt Park, shown above is one such example. For years it was considered an incredibly dangerous place visited primarily by criminals and malcontents. It has only recently begun to emerge as a place devoid of crime after twenty years of sustained economic growth and city attention.
Parks must fit the scale and context in which they are built. For example, a park in a more homogonized neighborhood must be larger in order to accomondate the rush of an entire population on the same schedule. In a thuroughly mixed neighborhood, on the other hand, parks, function just fine at a fraction of the size since differing schedules allow for continued use. These sorts of parks manage to fill themselves and don't require expensive city programs to draw crowds or police officers to keep an eye on them.
Thanks to Burnham, Chicago has an overabundance of enormous parks. The city would be much better served by smaller and more frequent restorative spaces that residents could enjoy on a regular basis. Fortunatley, private citizens have realized the many benefits of smaller parks. Through the urban gardening movement, many vacant lots have been converted into cozy restorative spaces.
Much of Chicago is single family or duplex housing like in the image shown above. These tracts of housing are greatly supplemented by elevator apartments and walk-ups. Housing is finely divided by long stretches of commercial areas, shown below, that are characterized by greater density, more traffic and an active street presence.
The following maps were produced by UrbanLab and more can be found at www.chil.us.
Click on the maps for a higher resolution. They show the clear separation of commercial and residential areas but the scale of this granulation is much finer than in the megablocks of Detroit. These frequent commercial areas grant residents access to retail and office space at close proximity, often within walking distance. That the separation exists at all is as much a historical artifact of egotistic planning dogma than any logical or empirical demonstration.
Corridors along the various 'L' lines develop much more than areas distant from rapid transit access. Where even marginal transit access falls away, the automobile takes over, carving out vast swaths for driving and parking. Even worse than the overdependance on the automobile is the creation of underserved communities. Transportation justice is a serious issue facing most cities and Chicago is no exception.
Chicago is fortunate enough to have a sizable population dedicated to making the city a better and more sustainable place. These people, scattered throughout the city, work largely without government support. The city administration talks a lot about green building, but their excessive emphasis on new condo construction and little else is likely to lead the city into a great unbalance of local use. They like to fancy themselves on the forefront of the green movement but those that are serious about sustainability are very much aware that such a claim would be totally baseless.
They are willing to spend over $3 billion on deep tunnel projects to prevent combined sewer overflows but unwilling to provide any sewer rate reductions to properties with green roofs, rain barrels or rain gardens. The City is expanding a curb-side recycling program but most residents are very much unsure that all of the collected recyclables are actually reused in any way.
All in all, the city is becoming a better place. With the economic downtown and slowdown of condo construction, city government will have a perfect excuse to start dealing with other issues in the city. Some more rational thinking on their part will greatly aid the already herculean efforts of ordinary citizens in their goal to make Chicago a better place.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Chicago - Wrap-up
Monday, January 12, 2009
Chicago - Resource Center
Sustainability can be split into two fairly distinctive parts. One branch is based on a reduction or optimization of consumptive patterns while the other is centered around the capture and re-purpose of available resources. The Resource Center in Chicago is dedicated to the latter.
Cities are full of unused resources, some stand out while others often go unnoticed by the average urban resident. The most obvious waste in a city is space but most wastes are less obvious. For example, a single shipping depot in Chicago dumps 1000 tons of produce per day. The Resource Center concerns itself with any and all ways they can to re-purpose various waste streams. This post will focus on the organization and I'll throw up a post a bit later on its founder, Ken Dunn.
One of the main focuses of the organization is to connect people with nutritious foods. This is an obvious goal for the group since so much nutritious food is wasted everyday. Standard methods of diverting excess food from landfills to low-income communities are limited to non-perishable foods. The resulting poor nutrition provided by these foods only serves to exasperate deteriorating public health conditions in lower income communities.
The Resource Center works to solve this problem on two fronts; first, they help create economically viable farms on vacant lots and second, they collect perishable food and distribute it before it has a chance to rot. City Farm manages pay their farmers a living wage by selling much of their food to high-end restaurants downtown at a premium while maintaining affordable prices for neighborhood dwellers. The farms are incredibly fertile due to the enormous volume of compost they are able to collect.
The Resource Center collects two tons of perishable food per day from from caterers, shippers and grocery stores which they deliver to hungry mouths before it has a chance to spoil. A vast majority of this food is sourced from Whole Foods since they pull their perishables days before they expire.
The Resource Center does not limit its operations to nutrition. The organization finds innovative ways to deal with other potentially valuable wastes. Unwanted bicycles are delivered by the truck load to a bike shop run by at-risk youth. Proceeds from the bike shop sales fund educational resources for the children that work there. As the children age, they progress through an educational curriculum that encourages achievement. This program not only keeps bikes out of landfills, it helps develop the minds of young children, the most important and most often wasted resource that any place has.
Many retail outlets donate their unsellable goods to the Resource Center for sale at the Resource Center headquarters. They are searching for a larger space after losing their old warehouse to a university expansion.
The Resource Center once had a contract to pick up recyclables throughout the city but it was promptly canceled when Mayor Harold Washington unexpectedly died. They are now reduced to providing strategic drop-off points for recyclables. The revenue generated from sales of collected materials has been greatly reduced over the last several months due to the crashing market for many recyclables. The Resource Center is now funding some of its operations with donations.
Talking to Ken Dunn reminded me of a story about a friend's grandfather when he was very young. In the late 1910's, a Detroit businessman heard about a factory that had accidentally produced a thousand extra left shoes. For some reason, they had no way of producing matching right shoes and they planned to throw the extra left shoes away. The businessman who had caught wind of the mishap purchased the lot of shoes for a few pennies and then, with the aid of my friends grandfather, looked up every amputee--there were many due to the recent war--in town. They could offer some amputees a better deal on shoes than they could find at a store where they had to buy a pair and throw away their right shoe.
If you're living in Chicago and looking to help out the cause of urban sustainability, check out this organization. If you're in other cities, use the Resource Center as a model. Identify a resource, connect it too a need. It's a timeless way of doing things and one that we must all engage in if we're going to move towards a sustainable society.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Finishing up in Chicago
My time has been incredibly busy in Chicago so I haven't had much writing time but I met with Ken Dunn of the Resource Center earlier today. He's a very interesting guy running a very interesting organization. I think I'll be writing at least two posts about our talk. I'm also working on a post for the Center for Green Technology and a general Chicago overview but it's kind of tricky since the place is so outlandishly big.
For your viewing pleasure, I've posted a couple images of Chicago taken today below the fold.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Chicago - Talk with Richard Kosmacher
Automobiles aren't the problem with cities, they're just the wrong solution to the problem of mobility. When they were first introduced, their vast advantages over the horse and carriage/wagon were only matched by their enormous cost. An early question must have certainly been posed: how can we share this resource effectively? In New York, the only American city with a large swath almost totally dependent on shared cars, the answer was the privately owned and operated taxi. The expense of the car is shared by many users and though the cost of the automobiles themselves have declined, in places like Manhattan, the cost of parking makes ownership totally impractical.
It turns out there are other, more socialistic ways to share cars. Take out the driver, jumble around some other details and the taxi service becomes a car-share. Successful car-sharing was pioneered in Europe in the 1980s the most wide-spread American flavor is the for-profit Zipcar however, several city scale operations exist throughout the country, many of them non-profits. One of those is Chicago-basedI-GO Car Sharing, brainchild of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. They've had a very exciting week and I was lucky enough to speak with Richard Kosmacher, the Business Development Manager at I-GO.
First a bit about I-GO itself. They maintain a strong collaboration with their parent organization, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a true pioneer in urban sustainability movement. Both organizations are located in an amazing LEED Retrofit Platinum building in Chicago's North Side, one of one two Platinum buildings in the city. I-GO is a non-profit and fills its small operational shortfall with grants and DOT highway funds.
The group has 13,000 members and 200 cars scattered throughout the city. The cars have dedicated spots and members have cards that they can use to unlock and rent them. Members pay a low yearly fee and a flat hourly rate, under $10/hour. Gas, insurance, maintenance and cleaning are all done by I-GO.
According to surveys, half of the group's members either gave up a car when they joined the program or decided not to buy a new one. Studies have shown that each car that I-GO puts on the road replaces 17 private cars. Individuals most likely to use the program live near dedicated I-GO parking spots. These spots are located in neighborhoods that are dense, close to public transit and have a lack of parking.
Last Tuesday, they unveiled a pilot program with the Chicago Transit Authority to bundle the usual train and bus passes with an I-GO card. The program is the culmination of over a year of collaboration between the CTA and I-GO and has generated an enormous amount of interest.
According to Richard, for people who live near an I-GO car, the economics of car sharing make it an obvious solution. The average car owner in America spends about $8,000 a year on their car, or 17% of household income. Someone using a car sharing service may spend about $1,000 on public transit, $1,000 on car share fees and around $500 on taxi and rental car service. In all, the saving can exceed $5,000 a year.
Car sharing is such a good solution to the collateral damage that car-usefulness causes. Businesses and individuals can maintain their mobility at a reasonable price in cities whose public transit leaves a bit to be desired. The reduction in the total volume of cars would theoretically devalue parking. Surface lots could be re-purposed, parking lanes could become bike lanes and wider sidewalks. Garages could become shops or yards and since auto use would be totally pay per time, people would avoid using their shared cars as much as possible. Fewer cars reduces congestion which allows those using cars and trucks to use them more effectively and reduce trip time.
For places that that are too sparse or poorly thought out to allow for public transit only, car-sharing fills a necessary mobility gap. If you think you might be able to abandon your car, check out this list to see if a car-sharing operation has sprouted up in your city.
Chicago - Interview with Greg Raymond
A lot of cities in this world have a lot of problems and Chicago is no exception. A couple years back, the city's mayor, Richard Daley, realized that a growing body of evidence pointed to green roofs as a way to reduce runoff, flooding, the urban heat island effect and air pollution. Either that or he was impressed with their aesthetic qualities on an European trip. Returning from the trip, he began a very well publicized push to dramatically increase green roofs in Chicago.
I had the chance to speak today with Greg Raymond, founder and chief of ecogardens, a leading Chicago based design/build firm that specializes in green roofs and gardens. It made for an interesting conversation and I've summed up the more critical points after the fold.
The green roof industry has enormous potential, but it is only economically viable if cities stop allowing developers and property owners to externalize the enormous costs of stormwater, increased heat exposure and air pollution. Greg told me that the only people making the decision to add green roofs were people who included an environmental component in their bottom line and institutions that had the lasting power to recoup their initial capital costs. Private developers are greatly reducing their interest in green roofs as the economy collapses and they don't have the capital to front for the 15-20 year payback.
The city, which mandates partial green roofs for all new public buildings but has no requirements for private buildings, seems to have allowed this issue to fall to the back burner. Aside from the apparently non-existent public money pledged to support capital costs, the city has no incentive system to encourage green roof building. European cities that have successfully fostered green roof development have done so by heavily taxing stormwater that leaves a development; that is reasonable since the city bears the cost of dealing with that water. Developers in those cities find buildings without green roofs hard to sell since they have significantly higher taxes. Chicago should get moving in that direction.
Greg told me that 75% of structural inspections, the first step of any green roof retrofit project, show insufficient building strength to carry the additional 20-30 pounds per square foot of dead load that a green roof requires. Talk about bad future planning. As buildings age, they must maintain the capacity to be upgraded without significant alteration. So while new buildings in Chicago don't typically have green roofs, they do have one advantage. A recent code change stemming from a porch collapse increased the live load requirement on Chicago roofs to 100 pounds per square foot. For some perspective, this is 250% of the live load requirements for parking garages. As far as I know, this regulation is not nationwide but it will greatly assist future generations of Chicago property owners who want to upgrade their buildings with green roofs.
Greg is hoping that federal buildings may see some stimulus money to increase energy efficiency through green roof construction.
The expense our society is willing to incur for the sake of acute human health (stronger buildings) relative to how little we are willing to pay to improve chronic human health always astonishes me. Green roofs keep sewage out of waterways, they decrease the need for polluting energy production and most importantly, they reduce the intensity of the biggest natural disaster killer, heat.
Since civil engineers have created a separate mechanism for addressing issues that affect their profession (International Building Code), I would recommend that the IBC increase roof live loads so that buildings built today will one day be able to support green roofs without extensive structural renovations. I don't see any reason why that change needs to wait for politicians to make fairly obvious policy changes.
As for Chicago, they need to get their act together. They certainly advanced green roof design at one point, but that crown has gone on to other cities. The priorities of the city's government no longer seem to include green roofs.
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