The University of Chicago Press recently published a large-format, slick-paper book entitled Chicago Metropolis 2020: The Chicago Plan for the Twenty-First Century. The title looks to the future, but those who read what’s inside will learn that Chicago’s civic and business elites want to begin the 21st century much as they ended the 19th–by trying to get the rest of us centralized, coordinated, and unified.
Politically, the 2020 planners would establish a new regional council and do away with many allegedly superfluous local governments. Ideologically, the 2020 planners would be much happier if Chicagoans were all of one mind, so that we could accomplish things without the noise and bother of politics. Without regional coordination and regional consensus, they fear, Chicago will become less pleasant and less prosperous, and may even fail to place in the “ten or fifteen great metropolitan centers of the world economic order that is emerging.”
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Greater Chicago flopped, but Lowden went on to become a reform governor of Illinois and a presidential hopeful. He sought to reform city government and extend its reach. But above all, according to his biographer William Hutchinson, he wanted to replace political disagreement with harmony. “By providing a cluster of ideals and measures which all good Chicagoans might gladly strive for, no matter in what part of the metropolis they lived,” Hutchinson writes, “he dreamed of ending much of the bickering between its geographic ‘divisions’ and many ethnic groups.”
“Chicago’s twentieth-century city builders largely ignored the civic ideals and forms essential to the 1909 plan,” writes Columbia University architectural historian Daniel Bluestone in his book Constructing Chicago. “Burnham and the Commercial Club advisers failed where they most wanted to succeed, in adding to the commercial city a refined, uplifting civic landscape that would foster social unity.”
But while Lake County supports open-space preservation, the county board has repeatedly failed to pass any kind of affordable-housing legislation. Without a commitment to let people of all races and incomes live in the suburbs, being against sprawl is just another way of living in a gated community. This is the opposite of the mixed-income and mixed-race communities the Metropolis 2020 planners want to see.
This vague and idealistic statement is the common ground that the Metropolis 2020 planners want us all to share. But we don’t. Some people think that economic vibrancy and environmental health are sometimes in conflict. Many people will argue with some of the specific assertions the Metropolis 2020 planners make:
Reasonable Chicagoans can and do disagree on these proposals. The question is how to work out our disagreements–and we have always worked them out through politics. But the Metropolis 2020 planners, like Burnham and Lowden, often write as though they’d like to bypass politics altogether and settle things based on their own opinions or those of their anointed experts.
