Planning Chicago
Hunt and DeVries have delivered a candid and unromantic account of how things get planned—or not planned—in a postindustrial Chicago striving for a place on the short list of truly global cities.(John McCarron)Hunt and DeVries have pulled off the impossible: they have produced an impartial treatment of postwar planning in a city where every decision to alter the built environment is politicized and contentious. A combination of meticulous research and years of experience with the projects and policies they describe allow them to navigate this high road. Happily, the authors do not just rehash well-trodden narratives of great men and their grandiose visions for the downtown or Lakefront; planning for neighborhoods, industrial districts, and the Chicago River share the stage with the Loop, filling out our understanding of who makes planning decisions and why they ultimately succeed or fail.(Rachel Weber, University of Illinois at Chicago)Hunt and DeVries have written an accessible, handy grand tour of Chicago’s planning history, which from City Beautiful to urban renewal to Millenium Park, mirrors the history of American planning at large.One-stop shopping for all that is Chicago planning: a remarkably wide ranging set of ideas and facts and history, both confirming what we know about Chicago’s planning and also surprising us too.Though many take Chicago’s current economic and cultural vibrancy for granted, between the boom years of the early 20th century and the current era lay the crisis of deindustrialization and outmigration from the 1950s into the 1980s. Hunt and DeVries concisely describe the transformational rebranding of Chicago from the industrial city to the globalized city and the resulting contradictions and long-term vulnerabilities: booming tourist-friendly islands and persistent poverty, inequality and demographic decline elsewhere.The book both celebrates the best of Chicago’s planning but doesn’t shy away from asking hard questions, concluding with a call for the reassertion of formal city planning in an era where TIFs and other financial policies serve as a problematic substitute for planning. Hunt and DeVries astutely expose a sobering irony about Chicago: this city, known as a birthplace and showcase of modern American planning, has arguably witnessed the devolution and devaluation of planning in recent decades.(Scott Campbell)