The first installment in my series on ideas for reconnecting Chicago with its natural expanded region in the Midwest focused on what could be enabled by linking Milwaukee and Indianapolis to Chicago via high speed rail. This makes it a good time to talk about Midwest high speed rail generally. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the idea of creating a Midwest high speed rail network. The federal government has already designated a system of Midwest rail corridors. There's a lobbying organization pushing it called the Midwest … [Read more...]
Chicago: Reconnecting the Hinterland, Part 1A – Metropolitan Linkages
In my kickoff of the year of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan in Chicago, I argued that while Chicago was performing well in a globalized world, it was only riding the wave of globalization and wasn't defining its own uniquely successful future, one where it first and most fully grasped the implications of our new world. I also promised ideas on where to look to do that, starting with re-embracing its own unique culture and identity, resisting homogenization. Today I start a four part mini-series looking at another … [Read more...]
Chicago: A Declaration of Independence
"One might fear the degree to which the city had declared its independence from nature, but at the same time one could hardly help feeling wonder at its audacity.""Other cities soon had railroads and elevators and refrigerator cars as well, but it was Chicago that first revealed the importance of such things to the West." - William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis As promised, I commence my year of looking back at the Burnham Plan of Chicago on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. To set the stage, let us first take a look at Chicago - its … [Read more...]
Pride of Place
How do you know a city that takes pride in itself? It's often the littlest things. Consider this stop sign from the city of Chicago. At first, this looks like any ordinary stop sign. But take a closer look at the bottom and look at what we see. The people who make street signs in the Chicago care enough, put enough pride into their work and their city, to sign the city's name at the bottom of every sign. This tells us something very powerful about the that place. Think it is an accident of geography, luck, or history that made … [Read more...]
Chicago: Corporate Headquarters and the Global City
Chicago is the Midwest's only "global city" (or world city if you prefer). There are many paradigms of the global city, but the most widely cited is Saskia Sassen's. The Cliff Notes version goes something like this. As businesses became more globalized and more virtualized, this created demand for new types of financial products and producer services - notably in the law, accounting, consultancy, and marketing areas - to help businesses service and control these far flung networks. These financial and producer services are subject to clustering … [Read more...]
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