Chicago is sprinting into the 21st Century as the model urban habitat. With an Administration full of Green Initiatives, including a Department of the Environment and the city's first "Green Czars", the city has ceased its long standing war with nature and embraced the concepts of sustainability.
Chicago was always at least partially beautiful, even amongst the slaughterhouses and steel mills. Unlike most cities, almost all of Chicago's waterfront property is beach and public park. There are almost 600 inland parks within the city limits, and in the neighborhoods the city blocks were designed to have a strip of grass and trees in-between the sidewalk and the street. These thousands upon thousands of trees act as a canopy over the city, sheltering the dense populace living below. Inspired by sister-city Paris, there is a vast forest preserve that rings much of the city, buffering it from the suburbs.
Back in 1989 newly elected Mayor Richard M. Daley was plagued with how to lift Chicago out of the post-industrial slag heap. He had a simple yet brilliant idea: plant more trees. This turned into a wholesale reformation of the city's crumbling 100+ year old infrastructure. Since 1989, the city has spent $5.2 billion improving Chicago's walkways, streets, parks and neighborhood communities. Most impressive amongst a list of admirable achievements was facing the great white elephant that was the Chicago River. Buildings once faced away from the river to avoid the stench, and the extent of damage was reminiscent of the Lake Erie chemical fires of the 1970s. Today large sections along both branches have reemerged as residential districts full of townhomes, high-rises and converted loft communities with a meticulously landscaped riverwalk stretching for miles.
Chicago met federal clean air standards faster than any other large metro, six years ahead of schedule. It cleaned up more than 1,000 acres of polluted industrial land, built the stunning $450 Million neo-modernist Millennium Park over a rail yard that was doubling as an open air parking lot, and created more than 100 miles of bike paths.
That Chicago surmounted a particularly daunting physical challenge should come as no surprise to anyone, least of all Chicagoans. This is a city with an impressive history of innovation that reaches far beyond the hot dog and the skyscraper, albeit with a notoriously feckless relationship to its natural habitat. Is it any wonder the term "ecology" was coined at the University of Chicago in large part because of Chicago's historical feud with nature?
http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue17/features/greencity.php