Chicago's Future: Dominated by Hollywood Robot-Generated Carnage or Something Friendlier?
By JoshMogerman in News on Jul 17, 2010 8:00PM
Two very different visions of Chicago’s future on public display right now. There is the ruinous pocked street scape from the high-profile carnage of Transformers 3 film sets laying waste to our town's iconic sites. And there is the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s GO TO 2040, a 400+ page sequel to Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago with high hopes for the Chi in the decades to come. Think of this as Optimus Prime vs. Primarily Optimistic. And while it lacks stars, throngs of gawkers, wrecked cars and wall-to-wall media attention, CMAP’s plan has the advantage of being far more approachable than Shia LaBeouf or Josh Duhamel---heck, the folks pulling GO TO 2040 together actually want your input.
GO TO 2040 is a comprehensive regional plan envisioning the changes necessary to keep Chicagoland economically competitive in the next 30 years. And what a competition it will be. The document predicts a world dominated by a handful of mega-regions. Randall Blankenhorn, CMAP’s executive director told the Chicago News Cooperative, “It’s no longer Chicago against Joliet and Waukegan and Elgin. It’s us against India and China and Brazil.”
In order to keep up, we seem to have a lot of work to do over the next quarter century. CMAP believes we will need to attract millions more people to the region, fix up our transportation systems to move goods and all those newbies around more efficiently, and generally class up the joint a bit by embracing a more livable community model. There is plenty in there on water and energy conservation, improved parks and open space, sustainable local food, public transportation investments, improved education and reformed tax policy. Whew…it is quite a list. Seems like we might need a couple giant robots point advanced weapons at some heads to fulfill that aggressive infrastructure agenda.
But don’t take our word for it. The whole plan is available for you to peruse at www.goto2040.org. Once you’ve leafed through the voluminous document, the planning agency wants to hear what you think. CMAP is taking public comments through August 6. While the document is not legally binding, it does present a framework for policymakers, infrastructure managers, and funders will take very seriously as an agenda setter in the future. The massive transportation center we heard about earlier this year and high speed rail are in the plan, but what else would you like to see covered? Re-reverse the Chicago River? Clean up our power grid? Maybe even end massive movie-related clusterstuffs that tie up downtown for days at a time? Thankfully, we do not have to choose between CMAP's vision and the impacts of warring aliens ripping into our boulevards and bridges (hey, if they come, there's not much we can do about it!). So, let's hear your suggestions on the stuff we can control.