Chicago needs a vision to rally around
Let's take on the world again.
“Make no small plans,” urged Daniel Burnham. Chicagoans, recovering from a fire that destroyed most of the city, rallied and rose to become one of the world’s most important cities. Now facing difficulties that hardly compare to the complete destruction of that fire, an overwhelmed Chicago makes only small plans.
Today’s Chicago is a city without a point of view. We have no vision to draw us together, no direction to aim. A couple of decades of collected mayoral announcements, all smart, all important-- and so many of them-- feel more like anxiety driven fidgeting than big-shouldered striding.
Sure, we have a thousand needs: a new relationship with the police, a different approach to young men, a path to employment across the city, a solution to our unfunded liabilities, a new sewer here, a new street there. Our mayors and much of our civic leadership have approached each dire challenge with brains and alacrity, but the game is small ball.
Burnham’s great plan was not implemented. If it had been, Chicago would have been the last major city built for horse traffic rather than the first built for a new age. Yet the plan rallied our citizens around an idea of what Chicago could be, and many of the investments made in the years that followed the plan paved the way for a remarkable century. I suggest we rally behind a new civic idea, one fit for an immigrant city with abundant fresh water in the middle of the world’s largest economy and well connected to the cities driving the global economy and culture.
Let’s set a big goal: Add a million people and surpass our historical peak population. Together, we can build the biggest and the best Chicago ever.
We had 3.6m people in 1960. Today 2.7m people call Chicago home. Let’s grow to include another million people and win the global competition for talent, capital and mindshare.
A Chicago with 3.7 million people could afford its infrastructure and use it more efficiently. It could afford transit improvements and transform its approach to public education. Revenue from 3.7 million citizens will ease the pain of decades of terrible decisions around pension funding. Instead of second city (actually now, 3rd), and fly-over status, we lack only the civic will to become a major node on a global network of culture and value creation that includes cities like Shanghai, New York, London, and Mexico City. We could say, as we once did, the future is invented here.
This vision is achievable. But it will take leadership from the business community rather than from City Hall to get there. The Burnham Plan was led by business leaders. No one even remembers who the mayor was back then. (It was Fred Busse). But the next mayor Bill Thompson used the plan to justify all sorts of new initiatives. The idea created space for the politics, not the other way around.
I’d love to talk about the strategies that can help us achieve this vision.