Why Chicago Needs Another Green River

Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway
Present

 

Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway
After

"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet ..." - Agent Smith THE MATRIX

Some years ago I started this blog with a proposal to make a high place for Chicago. Not a high place for religion or height. Although it could be. Not a high place of government. Although government would have to be a player. Not a high place of business. But who would pay for it? Lincoln Park, Grant Park, and so on would not exist if it were not for the philanthropy of Chicago's big business Olympia. Not a high place, or state, of being. This is not enlightenment. On the contrary, this can be a very real place for the City and for the non-City. Chicagoan and non-Chicagoan. Human and non-Human. It is for the better.




"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not be realized" - Daniel Burnham




The idea of burying our highways is not new. Boston did it with its Big Dig, realizing a plan a quarter century in the making. Chicago has done it with Millennium Park, an expensive but priceless gift to the City. This proposal follows in the footsteps of these two great plans. It is not a little plan. It is a big plan that places a green roof over the entire interstate highway system of Chicago. These roofs will become a natural habitat. It's tendrils will connect all of Chicago's natural preserves creating a green network where there were six lanes or more of asphalt. The plan is a great grandchild of Burnham's boulevard system. Here, instead of a green that is Parisian manicured splendour, prairie grasses will be allowed to grow free. The roof will be designed with an exhaust filtering system that is more catalytic than mechanical. Cars will be put in their place. Thereby, creating a Green-network where forest preserves bordering the City and the Lake are interconnected.  Flora and fauna can once again migrate throughout the whole of Chicagoland. And Chicago will have a new Green River.

Chicago: Beanstalk City

02.02.2009: Humanity has grown to not only live off the planet but dictate how it will develop. With our abilities of controlling the environment, lengthening our life spans, our ease at circumnavigating the globe, we have pioneered the earth to find that it has its limits. Our suburbs and farms have taken away earths natural habitats. The wild is becoming increasingly difficult to find. And the wild we find, we cage into preserves. We can not continue on this course.

“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet …” Agent Smith from The Matrix

We now have a responsibility to give back what we have taken. We need to create a habitat for ourselves. Abandon our suburbs. Contain our sprawl. Concentrate our lives and allow the earth to heal itself. Our cities shall be our habitat, our preserve, as in Chicago above. Our cities will use completely solar, wind, geothermal and other new sources of energy that do not make our atmosphere sick.

Similar in diagram to our own neural cells, our cities will house mega-populations in superstructures interconnected by a vast network of underground tunnels. Through which resources such as food will be transported, information and energy shared. Our concentrated way of living will relieve the earth of its burden to grow our food by constructing our own farms within the mega-structures of our cities. Farm land will be given back. Resources will be more conveniently shared by our proximity to each other. Our cities will be located throughout the world, like outposts, beanstalks to the sky, living among the wild life. We will allow the earth to self-sustain as we sustain ourselves in our cities.

We will use our earth-shaping abilities to save it, saving ourselves. We will be blessed to witness the resurrection of the earth’s natural habitats. By bounding ourselves, nature will grow beyond the fences we have constructed to allow lost ecosystems to replenish and redevelop. The entire earth will be a wildlife preserve. It is our honor to be stewards of how the earth develops. Let us step up the challenge.