Sinking Chicago
Subtitle: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: Mar 30, 2018
Language: eng
Format: paperback
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781439915493
Description: "Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region's waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers' heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes."--
Notes: Source title: Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment (Urban Life, Landscape and Policy)