Daniel Burnham: The Man Who Planned the Future of Cities

Meet Daniel Burnham, the visionary behind the 1909 Plan of Chicago, one of the most influential urban plans in history. His designs weren’t just about beauty—they were about efficiency, mobility, and making cities places people wanted to live in. He believed in bold visions, grand architecture, and transforming chaotic urban sprawl into well-organized, monumental spaces.

But how did Burnham come up with his ideas? And how did the 1909 Chicago Plan change the city forever? Stay with me as we explore the story of a man who believed in "Make no little plans" and forever changed urban life.

 

Early Life and Career: The Architect of the Future

Born in 1846, Daniel Burnham started his career in architecture but soon realized that buildings alone weren’t enough—entire cities needed better planning. By the late 19th century, Chicago was booming. The population had exploded from 30,000 in 1850 to over 1.7 million by 1900. But with that growth came problems: overcrowding, poor sanitation, traffic congestion, and lack of green space.

Burnham had already made a name for himself as the director of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, where he transformed 600 acres of swampy land into a stunning neoclassical "White City" that attracted over 27 million visitors. The success of this fair proved that urban design could be both beautiful and functional, inspiring Burnham’s future city planning ideas.

 

The 1909 Plan of Chicago: A Bold Vision

At the turn of the century, Chicago was growing faster than any city in the world. But with rapid growth came chaos—narrow streets, pollution, and slums. Burnham, alongside his partner Edward Bennett, took on the ambitious task of redesigning the entire city with the Plan of Chicago, published in 1909.

This plan was revolutionary. It proposed:

• A citywide road system with grand boulevards and diagonal streets for better traffic flow.
• A massive lakefront park system, ensuring that the entire Chicago lakefront remained public land.
• A network of parks and green spaces, to improve quality of life.
• A new, efficient rail and freight system to reduce congestion.
• Civic and cultural centers, including a majestic central plaza inspired by European cities.

One of the most audacious ideas? A completely restructured lakefront, turning what was once industrial land into over 25 miles of uninterrupted public parks and beaches—a feature that defines Chicago to this day.

 

Transforming Chicago: What Was Actually Built?

The Plan of Chicago wasn’t just an idea—it shaped real, lasting changes. Over the next decades, the following have been fulfilled. 

• Grant Park was expanded, becoming Chicago’s "front yard," home to landmarks like Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago.
• The city developed a network of parks and forest preserves, adding thousands of acres of green space.
• Wacker Drive was constructed, following Burnham’s vision for multilayered roads that separated commercial and pedestrian traffic.
• The rail system was restructured, leading to modern commuter transit improvements.

But not everything in the plan came to life. Burnham envisioned monumental civic centers and grand European-style boulevards that never fully materialized. Still, his ideas inspired countless city planners across the U.S., leading to better city layouts in Washington D.C., San Francisco, and even overseas in Manila.

 

Beyond Chicago: Burnham’s Global Influence

Burnham’s genius wasn’t limited to Chicago. His planning ideas influenced:

• Washington D.C. – He redesigned the National Mall, shaping it into the monumental space we know today.
• San Francisco – After the 1906 earthquake, he proposed a radical redesign of the city, though it was never fully realized.
• Manila and Baguio (Philippines) – Burnham’s master plan for Manila featured wide boulevards, waterfront parks, and grand civic buildings, some of which still exist today.

His influence laid the foundation for modern urban planning, inspiring the City Beautiful Movement, which emphasized grand, organized, and aesthetically pleasing city designs.

 

The Legacy of Daniel Burnham

More than a century later, Daniel Burnham’s vision still shapes Chicago and countless other cities. His ideas about green space, transportation, and urban beauty remain cornerstones of city planning today. His "Make no little plans" philosophy reminds us that cities should be designed for both function and inspiration.

So, next time you walk through Chicago’s downtown, Washington D.C.’s National Mall, or even parts of Manila, remember that one man’s big dreams and bold ideas helped create the cities we know today.

More about the history of urban planning:

The history of Indian railways: Colonial beginnings, overcrowding, and socioeconomic impacts

Which city built the first bike lane? A Tale of Bicycles, Cars, and Urban Revolution

Porto: A Timeless Journey Through History, Monuments, and Architecture

Urban Transformations of the Mediterranean Cities in Light of Developments in the Modern Era

Rightsizing Shrinking Cities: The urban design dimension

ANALYZING NEIGHBORHOOD RETAIL AND SERVICE CHANGE IN SIX CITIES

by C. Theodore Koebel

Little is known about neighborhood retail and service establishments, although they are often identified as positive attributes of successful neighborhoods and have been promoted through various community development programs. To date, research from urban and public policy fields has concentrated on the political economy of large-scale commercial development projects, particularly those promoted through public-private partnerships. Nonetheless, distressed neighborhood commercial districts present serious obstacles to the vitality of neighborhoods and the success of residential redevelopment. Consequently, neighborhood commercial spaces are often the focus of redevelopment programming. Our lack of knowledge about neighborhood retail and service establishments is itself an obstacle to community development.
The fundamental thesis of this research is that change in neighborhood retail and service establishments (number of establishments, employment size of establishment, number of employees, and payroll) is a function of market and non-market factors. The primary market factors relate to levels of demand from the residents of the businesses’ market areas and proximity to negative externalities in or near the neighborhood. The primary non-market factors are discrimination due to race and ethnicity, and the impact of household characteristics unrelated to demand.
The study uses a special data set for six cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Oakland) and immediately surrounding counties. The data set includes 1980 and 1990 decennial census variables, and 1982-83 and 1992-93 mortgage volumes, as well as change measures for "stock" variables and rate of change measures for "flow" variables. Additional items (e.g. public housing units, distance to the CBD, and location of major retail centers outside the CBD) have been added to the data set. The dependent variable is the change in the number of establishments for neighborhood retail and service businesses. The current study overcomes previous impediments to analyzing neighborhood retail and service establishments by utilizing a special five-digit zip code data set from the CBP program and by aggregating census tracts to correspond to zip code areas.

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more about centrality:

Can Betweenness Centrality Explain Traffic Flow?

Correlating Densities of Centrality and Activities in Cities: the Cases of Bologna (IT) and Barcelona (ES)

Geographically Weighted Regression: A Method for Exploring Spatial Nonstationarity

Correlating street centrality with commerce and service location in cities

Street Centrality and Densities of Retails and Services in Bologna, Italy

Street Centrality and Densities of Retails and Services in Bologna, Italy

Spatial Network Analysis of Public Transport Systems: Developing a Strategic Planning Tool to Assess the Congruence of Movement and Urban Structure in Australian Cities

Centrality in networks of urban streets

River gyms and stackable cars: The future for sustainable design

via ArchiTechno

Speaking about the Future of Sustainable Design, Joachim and Chicago architects Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill painted a dramatically innovative and greener future.
“We’re looking at a more holistic, pluralistic approach,” said Gill, speaking after the event. The Chicago partnership of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture is doing just that.
In a planned retrofit of Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower), the partners propose to reduce electricity use by 80 percent, the equivalent of 68 million kilowatt hours or 150,000 barrels of oil per year.
Smith and Gill presented a string of similarly mind-boggling statistics throughout a half-hour lecture that covered wind-farms built into high-rises, self-insulated structures that operate like thermos bottles to eliminate air conditioning and green roofs.

Their Chicago Central Area De-Carbonization Plan even proposes to create an emission-free downtown by 2030.
Smith said that when people think of climate change, they don’t realize that buildings contribute a whopping 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, beating out the more commonly-conceived villain: vehicles.

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more about architecture:

Architecture: Domes Throughout History- Domes of the Past, Present and Future

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (Book Review)

Will Chicago finally get a new supertall skyscraper?

A new architectural landmark in Barcelona: Torre Telefónica Diagonal ZeroZero by EMBA

The Multicultural City and the Politics of Religious Architecture: Urban Planning, Mosques and Meaning-making in Birmingham, UK

Print Reading for Architecture & Construction

On Architecture: Collected Reflections On A Century Of Change

Digital Drawing For Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques And Tools For Digital Representation In Site Design

Vernacular Architecture And Regional Design: Cultural Process And Environmental Response

Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods

by Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush

This article assesses the sources and consequences of public disorder. Based on the videotaping and systematic rating of more than 23,000 street segments in Chicago, highly reliable scales of social and physical disorder for 196 neighborhoods are constructed. Census data, police records, and an independent survey of more than 3,500 residents are then integrated to test a theory of collective efficacy and structural constraints. Defined as cohesion among residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of public space, collective efficacy explains lower rates of crime and observed disorder after controlling neighborhood structural characteristics. Collective efficacy is also linked to lower rates of violent crime after accounting for disorder and the reciprocal effects of violence. Contrary to the “broken windows” theory, however, the relationship between public disorder and crime is spurious except perhaps for robbery.

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more about urban sociology:

The sociology of urban public spaces

Urban Planning and Cultural Inclusion

Creative Copenhagen: Globalization, Urban Governance and Social Change

URBAN SOCIOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology

Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory

Working-Class Respectability in Leicester c.1845-1880

Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City

Culture and Urban Revitalization: A Harvest Document

by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert

Advocates have long argued that the economic benefits of the arts and culture provide a firm rationale for public support. Recent scholarship on the “creative class” and “creative economy” is simply the latest effort to link cultural expression to community prosperity. In contrast, the social benefits of cultural engagement have received relatively little attention, even though—as we shall see—they provide a stronger case.
We need to avoid a simplistic either-or choice between the economic and social impacts of the arts. People who live in our cities, suburbs, and countryside are simultaneously consumers, workers, residents, citizens, and participants. Culture’s role in promoting community capacity and civic engagement is central to its potential for generating vital cultural districts. To separate the economic and the social impacts of the arts makes each more difficult to understand.
This document provides an overview of the state-of-the-art literature on culture and urban revitalization. In Part 2, we place the creative sector in contemporary context with a discussion of three social dynamics. The “new urban reality” has restructured our cities by increasing social diversity—fueled by new residential patterns, the emergence of young adult districts, and immigration; expanding economic inequality; and changing urban form. Shifts in the economic and political environment have changed the structure of the creative sector. Finally, the changing balance of government, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions in social policy development—the shift to transactional policymaking— has profound implications for cultural policy and the creative sector broadly defined. These three forces—the new urban reality, the changing structure of the creative sector, and the emergence of transactional policy-making—define the context within which culture-based revitalization takes place.

Part 3 turns to the major dimensions of current literature on culture-based urban revitalization: the promise of the creative economy; culture’s role in building community capacity; and the negative consequences of culture-based development. Part 4 uses the critical synthesis afforded by our review of the creative economy and community building literature to propose a new model of a neighborhood-based creative economy. Part 5 concludes with a reflection on research gaps as well as the implications of the literature for community development policy and practice. Here we postulate that U.S. cities have the potential to regenerate urban neighborhoods through culture-based strategies that combine wealth-creation and social justice—but only by digesting the lessons of past experience.
The two literatures on culture-based development—economic revitalization and community building—have generally evolved along separate paths with relatively little interaction. By contrast, the European discussion of culture and revitalization has been characterized by intense efforts to integrate these two dimensions. Motivated by “third way” social policies—which try to link a neo-liberal emphasis on productivity and competitiveness with a social concern about exclusion—Great Britain under New Labour has invested in “social regeneration” schemes precisely because they promise both economic growth and social integration. As a result of this political commitment, British policy-makers have devoted considerably more effort than their American counterparts to developing theories of arts-based redevelopment, methods for assessing its effectiveness, and design criteria for practitioners.
One lesson of the European experience that resonates with that of the United States is a preoccupation with gentrification and displacement. There is a widespread perception on both sides of the Atlantic that artists serve as the opening wedge of real-estate speculation and neighborhood destruction. Thus, although the case for the effectiveness of culture-based development is far from airtight, the possibility of residential dislocation poses the greatest barrier to its wider acceptance.

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more about revitalization:

Shrinking Cities: The Forgetting Machine

It's a Big Week for the Ft. McPherson Redevelopment Project

Partnership, Collaborative Planning and Urban Regeneration

NON INNER-CITY GENTRIFICATION IN ISRAEL

Revitalization of Urban Areas through Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) – Trends and Expectations for Shrinking Cities

How Brownfield Redevelopment Reduces Pollution

Will Chicago finally get a new supertall skyscraper?

via The Chicago ARchitecture Blog

Yesterday, grand plans were unveiled for redeveloping Chicago’s old Main Post Office (433 West Van Buren Street), and the surrounding area.  They include the construction of five residential, hotel, and office skyscrapers perched atop a massive parking, retail, and transit podium spanning the Chicago River.

The highest profile portion of the project is a 120-story tower to be built just west of the river at 350 West Harrison Street.  The skyscraper was envisioned by the architecture firm of Booth Hansen as a single building which splits into two equal halves two-thirds of the way up.  Each remaining shaft is lens-shaped, with indented shafts on the ends, much like the single tower that makes of the nearby Hyatt Center (71 South Wacker Drive).

This massive tower is mimicked by two smaller residential towers at 800 South Wells Street.  A hotel tower at 536 South Canal Street is similar, but only consists of a single shaft.

All of these buildings are connected by a multi-story slab of parking, retail, and commercial space covering close to six city blocks.  It’s a huge amount of space to fill.  By the numbers:

• 6,200,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space
• 4,100,000 square feet of hotel space
• 3,800,000 square feet of residential space
• 2,000,000 square feet of office space

The developer, International Property Developers, sees it as a new gateway to Chicago, and wants to start construction by next year.  The project would be tackled in three phases, ending in 2022.

It’s a grand dream that has been received with some amount of skepticism.  This is the fourth time in the last decade or so that a tower of over 100 stories has been proposed for Chicago, and none of them have been built.

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The Hyatt Center, Chicago, by orijinal

The Hyatt Center, Chicago, by 24gotham

The Hyatt Center, Chicago, by 24gotham

The Hyatt Center, Chicago, by Vincent Desjardins

more about Chicago:

PhD in Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago

Sustaining a Sense of Place in a Great Neighborhood

“Greening Up” Urban Communities and Displacing the Poor

The Maddening Wrongness of TTI’s Annual Urban Mobility Rankings

Chicago Takes a Census Shellacking

PhD in Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Prior Degrees Applicants must normally have a master’s degree in Urban Planning or related program.
• Grade Point Average At least 3.00/4.00 for the final 60 semester hours (90 quarter hours) of undergraduate study.
• Tests Required GRE General. Applicants may substitute the GMAT or LSAT.
• Minimum English Competency Test Score
  • TOEFL 550 (paper-based); 213 (computer-based); 80, with subscores of Reading 19, Listening 17, Speaking 20, and Writing 21 (iBT Internet-based), OR,
  • IELTS 6.5, with subscores of 6.0 for all four subscores.
• Letters of Recommendation Three required.
• Personal Statement Required. A research statement, including the applicant's educational and professional goals, and detailing relevant academic and employment experience.
• Other Requirements Applicants must submit a recent paper, essay, or project of which they are the sole author or designer. This material may be of an academic, professional, or personal nature, and must be at least 1000 words in length. Applicants for research assistantship positions are encouraged to submit a resume.
• Deadlines The application deadline for this program is earlier than the Graduate College deadline; check the Department or Graduate College webpage for information on application deadlines.

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University of Illinois at Chicago, by davidwilson1949

more PhDs in urban planning:

The International Doctorate Programme European Urban Studies (IPP-EU), Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany

PhD in Urban & Regional Planning, University of Sydney, Australia

PhD in Design program in North Carolina State University

PhD in Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville

PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences in Texas A&M University

Bike Share: A slice of Paris in Chicago

By Mary Schmich

It's not every day that you can stroll down a Chicago sidewalk and think you've been magically zapped to Paris.

But I was cruising down Ohio Street Thursday when — zut alors! There was a row of rental-bike docks that looked a lot like Paris' famous Velib' stations.

Half a dozen guys were fiddling with the machines, making sure everything would work on Friday when Chicago debuts its first city bike-share program.

There are only 100 bikes and only six locations, but if this experiment works, bike-sharing could become a Chicago way of life.

To find out more, I called Josh Squire. He's the founder of Bike and Roll, which is managing the program.

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Bike sharing in Chicago, by simonk

Bike shring in Chicago, photo by ambimb

Bike sharing in Chicago, photo by clarkmaxwell

more abour bicycle planning:

Metroradruhr: Germany's Ruhr Valley Inter-City Bike Sharing

Bike Parking: a Key Part of the Bicycle Planning Amenities

Innovative Urban Transport Concepts Moving from Theory to Practice

Short Skirt Protest Ride Happens Tonight

Analyzing Land Use Change In Urban Environments

by USGS

Metropolitan areas in the United States are growing at unprecedented rates, creating extensive urban landscapes. Many of the farmlands, wetlands, forests, and deserts that formed the America of 1900 have been transformed during the past 100 years into human settlements. Almost everyone has seen these changes to their local environment but without a clear understanding of their impacts. It is not until we study these landscapes from a spatial perspective and the time scale of decades that we can begin to measure the changes that have occurred and predict the impact of changes to come.
The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Urban Dynamics Research (UDR) program studies the landscape transformations that result from the growth of metropolitan regions over time. Using sources such as historic maps, aerial photographs, and Landsat satellite data, USGS scientists first assemble retrospective urban land use databases that reflect several decades of change. These databases are then used to analyze the effects of urbanization on the landscape, and to model urban growth and land use change under alternative growth scenarios.

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Land use change in lower Queen Anne, Seattle, 1920-1953, by Seattle Municipal Archives

more about urban land use:

SMART GROWTH, SMART CHOICES SERIES: MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT

Innovation and the American Metropolis

Spatial Planning, Urban Form and Sustainable Transport: An Introduction

Research Methods in Urban and Regional Planning

Sustaining a Sense of Place in a Great Neighborhood

By Roberta Rewers, APA Public Affairs Associate

Have you visited a neighborhood or community and left thinking about its character, charm, and beauty? A hallmark of APA’s Sustaining Places initiative is not just about how places can sustain life and civilizations but also how places can be sustained. A good example of such a place is the Pullman Neighborhood on Chicago’s south side.

The Pullman Neighborhood was recently designated one of APA’s 2011 Great Neighborhoods as part of its Great Places in America program. The program identifies 10 great streets, 10 great neighborhoods, and 10 great public spaces each year and celebrates places of exemplary character, quality, and planning.

What makes the Pullman designation even more special is that the neighborhood was nearly demolished 50 years ago for a proposed industrial park. Community members came together and worked to save the neighborhood, its buildings, history, and character.

Pullman was established in 1880 by George M. Pullman, president of Pullman’s Palace Car Company.

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Pullman Neighborhood, Chicago, photo by reallyboring

more readings of this kind:

Becoming Greenest: Recommendations for a More Sustainable Washington, D.C.

How the Imagery of "Urbanized" Motivates Better Places

Living Cities: Collaboration is Key

INTEGRATING PLACE IDENTITY, URBAN SUSTAINABILITY AND GLOBALIZATION: A GREAT CHALLENGE FOR THE CITY OF THE FUTURE

Gentrification before Gentrification? The Plight of Pilsen in Chicago

Since the 1960s, activists have used the term gentrification to describe and challenge the recent path of socio-economic and spatial restructuring in major US cities. Whether we limit its definition to the displacement/replacement of lower- by higher-income households or expand it to address the wholesale transformation of the city into a place of speculation and spectacle, gentrification has spread steadily driving up along the way real estate prices to unprecedented levels. In Chicago, gentrification has advanced in the last three decades to cover the ring of neighborhoods surrounding the CBD, the lakefront, selected train or station routes, and other areas particularly in the north side and is moving into many other locations of strategic importance to the public-private growth coalition presiding over the process.

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Urban Planning Today

Urban Planning Today reports on projects in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Portland, bringing perspectives of urban design, city planning, criticism, and law to bear on the mixed bag of results observed in these cities.

more about Atlanta:

New Urbanism and Planning History: Back to the Future

Skyline photos of Atlanta 1

Tomorrow is Another Day for Atlanta’s Sustainable Transport

Real Estate Brokerage to Unfettered Development: A History of Sprawl

via Random History

In 1908, the nascent National Association of Real Estate Exchanges met in Chicago for their first annual meeting. Members of the association were seeking to organize themselves around principles with designs as lofty as saving America from the perceived ill effects of wholly unregulated development. In one major sense, such “unfettered” development would later be termed “sprawl,” and despite early efforts to help prevent it, it is the defining characteristic of urban and suburban development for the better part of the twentieth century in America—but it is not unique to the last century. At the time, however, optimism reined supreme, particularly in Chicago, which had the advantage of designing a major metropolitan center onto a relatively clean slate, following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. One of the oldest organized boards of real estate brokers, the Chicago Real Estate Board, addressed overarching questions pertaining to the common civic good and the future of their city. For this reason, the Chicago board became the model upon which similar boards in major cities around the nation were based. These local boards were the fraternities of real estate men (though woman successfully entered the field and gained membership in boards in increasing numbers, particularly at the onset of World War II, and would later hold the majority among residential realtors) that began to think in “high-class” professional terms and organized in Chicago for the first of many meetings designed to elevate their status as hard-working middle-class Americans with a truly legitimate profession with a truly ethical mission (Hornstein 2005).

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more about planning history:

Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning

Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City

City Beautiful movement

Chicago Takes a Census Shellacking

by Aaron M. Renn

The Census results are out for Illinois, and it's bad news for the city of Chicago, whose population plunged by over 200,000 people to 2,695,598, its lowest population since before 1920.  This fell far short of what would have been predicted given the 2009 estimate of 2,851,268. It's a huge negative surprise of over 150,000, though perhaps one that should have been anticipated given the unexpectedly weak numbers for the state as a whole that were released in December.
The American Community Survey data from last year show a clear improvement in items like college degree attainment (up 7.6 percentage points since the 2000 Census) and median household income (up 18%, which trailed the nation slightly, but beat Cook County and the state).  These data points show the very real improvements that have swept over a portion of the city, the visible gentrification that envelops the greater core area has now been shown to have been unable to power overall population growth, or to restrain the rampant exurbanization in the region.

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Suburban Chicago, photo by Philabeemer

more about Chicago:

City Beautiful movement

The Maddening Wrongness of TTI’s Annual Urban Mobility Rankings

Top 20 Urban Planning Successes of All Time

City Beautiful movement

via Art History

The City Beautiful movement was a Progressive reform movement in North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities to counteract the perceived moral decay of poverty-stricken urban environments. The movement, which was originally most closely associated with Chicago and Washington, D.C., did not seek beauty for its own sake, but rather as a social control device for creating moral and civic virtue among urban populations. Advocates of the movement believed that such beautification could thus provide a harmonious social order that would improve the lives of the inner-city poor. 

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The City Hall of San Francisco California, http2007

more about City Beautiful Movement:

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

The Maddening Wrongness of TTI’s Annual Urban Mobility Rankings

by Angie Schmitt 

The Texas Transportation Institute yesterday released its urban mobility report, its annual ranking of the nation’s cities based on their relative highway congestion. Topping this year’s list were Chicago and D.C.

Let’s imagine for a second all the ways we might measure a concept as broad as urban mobility. Maybe calculate the average speed of buses. Or factor in the percentage of people who can walk to their local grocery store.

But rather than delve into the complexity of urban transport, TTI boils mobility down to a single measure: the speed of traffic on a given city’s highways. Newspapers all over the country today will be carrying stories about their city’s relative congestion rate and all the stories will be based on this narrow measurement.

David Alpert at Network blog Greater Greater Washington explains that even when it comes to measuring just car commuting, TTI continues to get it wrong:

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Chicago, IL, photo by ifmuth

more posts about Chicago: 

Top 20 Urban Planning Successes of All Time

“Greening Up” Urban Communities and Displacing the Poor