chicago posts, articles, and infographics | Sustainable Cities Collective

Defending the American Grid

February 26, 2012 by Paul Knight
with 252 views

What should be the preferred layout for a new neighborhood? As a grid-enthusiast I feel compelled to defend the orthogonal grid on three major points. [read more]

Chicago Applies NACTO Urban Bikeway Guidelines

January 30, 2012 by TheCityFix - produced by EMBARQ
with 89 views

Last year, the National Association of City Transportation Officials released a technical guide on how to implement bike lanes in urban areas. We now see that Chicago is applying these guidelines to create safe biking paths across the city. We previously wrote about Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s commitment to providing safe and protected spaces... [read more]

Chicago Urban Farm Aims for Environmental & Economic Self-Sufficiency

January 17, 2012 by This Big City
with 621 views

Forget roof gardens; the only thing to have growing on a city centre building these days is a farm. Businessweek magazine has ranked the vertical farm as one of its top 20 businesses of the future, and leading the charge is The Plant in Chicago, which opened this summer. [read more]

Chinese Municipalities Face Debt Scrutiny Echoing US Cities

July 7, 2011 by Adam Mayer
with 94 views

Credit rating agency Moody’s recently released a report claiming that Chinese financial auditors have understated local government debt by half a trillion dollars. This is no small estimate, and the thought of so many non-performing loans on bank balance sheets is enough to make any seasoned investor bearish on China. Of course, the... [read more]

Entrepreneurs Reboot City Government

June 29, 2011 by Next American City
with 111 views

When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in early 2009, then-Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago knew he needed to think differently about how best to obtain and effectively use ARRA funds to help mitigate the local impacts of the recession. So he turned to Civic Consulting Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit public/private partnership, to help structure the application for funds and the implementation of ARRA-backed programs. [read more]

Are Big Suburban Corporate Campuses Over?

May 31, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 298 views

In the late 1990s, when Don Chen, Matt Raimi and I were researching our book, Once There Were Greenfields, we lamented the flight of business from America’s central cities to increasingly outer suburbs and farmland. In that book we frequently turned for data to metropolitan Chicago where, for example, Ameritech had built a... [read more]

Keeping Urban Farmers Safe

April 20, 2011 by The Dirt ASLA
with 933 views

Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.), URS, and City of Chicago outlined how to safely farm an urban garden on top of a contaminated site at a national conference on brownfields. As Amy Yersavich, Ohio E.P.A. explained, “urban gardens aren’t going to come and go. They are here to stay... [read more]

Cities Use Brownfields to Go Solar

April 13, 2011 by The Dirt ASLA
with 1,456 views

New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia increasingly view their contaminated inner-city brownfield sites as natural locations for large-scale solar installations. At the national Brownfields conference, each city explained how solar farms can be set up in the unlikeliest places, saving the money involved in cleaning up some... [read more]

Transit-based industrial development

March 2, 2011 by Kaid Benfield
with 514 views

Almost all discussion of transit-accessible development that I have been part of has revolved around mixed-use neighborhoods and/or affordable housing. Both are important and much needed. But so are transit-accessible jobs. As the Center for Neighborhood Technology points out in a new report, Next Stop: New Jobs (2MB... [read more]

More Biking Lessons from Portland

March 1, 2011 by Next American City
with 880 views

Bikers take part in a Sunday Parkways Celebration.Promoting Biking to Those beyond the Young and the Fearless Portland’s 2030 Bicycle Master Plan, unanimously adopted by the city council earlier this year, envisions Portland as “a world class bicycling city” by tripling the overall mileage of bikeways in the hopes of encouraging even... [read more]

Honesty in Transit Marketing

February 28, 2011 by TheCityFix - produced by EMBARQ
with 438 views

The Minnesota Valley Transit Authority wrapped 10 buses in a clever "Bus 2.0" livery to publicize new intelligent transport system (ITS) technology. Photo via EMBARQ. Today’s information-rich world enables city dwellers to share experiences on public transport faster than any transit agency could ever hope to publish a press release,... [read more]

Arts as proven economic driver in placemaking

February 3, 2011 by Neil Takemoto
with 1,577 views

Is investing in the arts, as it relates to placemaking, profitable? Try this quote, coming from a real estate development organization (ULI), “There is a growing body of evidence that thoughtful investment in arts and culture initiatives can generate significant economic benefits for cities large and small. Looking at data collected... [read more]