Time to think big, bold once again

"Make no little plans," said 19th century architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham. He would be impressed by an award-winning plan by a Bridgeport duo, Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen of UrbanLab, whose cross-disciplinary design firm handles building and renovations.

Dunn and Felsen have proposed turning some Chicago streets into "eco-boulevards" featuring man-made waterways for naturally cleaning waste and storm water. The eco-boulevards would not only recycle water, which scientists expect to be an increasingly scarce commodity this century, but add substantially to the city's parkland and garden acreage.

The plan even would return farmland, forests, and prairies to the interior of the city for the first time since the days of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. The plan also would restore the natural flow of the Chicago River, which was reversed from east to west in 1899.

Implementing this plan would fit Chicago's 19th and early 20th century grand tradition of doing things big—reversing the river, constructing the el, building Northerly Island, filling in huge swaths of lakefront to create new communities such as Streeterville, holding world's fairs, erecting massive public housing projects, and creating the expressway system. All of these were huge projects that many people did not think could be done—until Chicago did them. Not all of them worked, but all were the result of thinking big and bold.

Governments have shied away from such huge projects in recent years. They are tougher to do because community input is required (and rightly so) and because politicians fear a backlash to any public expenditure, fueled by those who believe all government is bad—a philosophy that has taken root since the 1980s but was unheard of in the era of thinking big and bold.

Tough, but not impossible. The time for bigness and boldness has come again. With economists predicting a shrinking economy, such a massive program would create thousands of jobs in the city. And with scientists predicting a shrinking water supply, dealing with the situation before it becomes a crisis would merely be sound governmental policy—the aquatic equivalent of fixing the bridge before it falls down.

We urge the City to give the Dunn/Felsen plan serious consideration. Chicago has done big and bold before. Their time has come again.