Tuesdays at APA: Planning Chicago (Reviving a Place for Planning in the City)

Despite a storied planning history, Chicago is no longer a city
that plans with confidence and vision. Chicago lacks a city
department with the name "planning" in its title. Instead, this
essential municipal function is now largely focused on immediate
zoning matters with long range and strategic planning in a
secondary role and largely replaced with piecemeal, ad hoc, and
volunteer planning efforts – often funded and focused on
disconnected Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts.


The city had great success in the 1950s and 1960s in crafting
strong central area plans and path-breaking comprehensive plans
that laid the groundwork for a major commercial and residential
revival. In the most recent decade however major planning
initiatives have been largely unimplemented and replaced by
deal-making, site-specific and one-off projects. Systematic,
coordinated, long-range efforts have been difficult to initiate
or sustain. Drawing on their new APA Planners Press book Planning
Chicago, authors Jon B. DeVries, AICP, and D. Bradford Hunt of
Roosevelt University will explain the rise and retreat of
planning over the past half century and the need for a planning
renaissance in Chicago.