New City - “Eleven Leaders on How the Twenties will Roar in Chicago”

January 30, 2020
20200130 Eleven Leaders on How the Twenties will Roar in Chicago New City

Design Prin­ci­pal and Founder Car­ol Ross Bar­ney joins lead­ers in shar­ing a per­fect vision” for Chicago’s con­tin­ued evolution.

Near­ly three mil­lion peo­ple lived in Chica­go in 1920. In less than sev­en­ty years it had grown from a vil­lage of under 30,000 to the world’s fifth largest city. This explo­sive growth result­ed from abun­dant resources, expan­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties and unbri­dled inge­nu­ity unleashed to cre­ate a liv­able city. Today, one-hun­dred years lat­er, Chica­go still has those qual­i­ties — and the poten­tial to be one of the world’s most pro­gres­sive and desir­able cities.

But we have work to do.

Future Chica­go needs to be denser, tighter and efficient.

Cities attract smart peo­ple who want to work with oth­er smart peo­ple. World-chang­ing ideas hap­pen when we work and live togeth­er. Plan­ning tra­di­tion­al­ly at a con­stant and uni­form­ly low den­si­ty worked in the last cen­tu­ry, but in a city tran­si­tion­ing from mak­ing things to think­ing things, a dif­fer­ent approach to cap­ture col­lec­tive ener­gy is needed.

The new dense city needs new inge­nious sys­tems. We have to see our exist­ing resources in new ways. Can rooftops pro­duce food? Can we lever­age our fresh water for green man­u­fac­tur­ing? Can we use the riv­er for trans­porta­tion? Can we use data to relieve con­ges­tion and short­ages? How can we har­vest… and re-har­vest… clean ener­gy?

Today’s Chica­go, orga­nized by a two-dimen­sion­al grid sliced by arte­ri­als, will be rebuilt as an exquis­ite mul­ti-dimen­sion­al envi­ron­ment. The new sys­tems will be bio­met­ric… more like your hand than a grid..”

Read the full arti­cle at new​c​i​ty​.com.

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