Thinking About Chicago Climate Change

In a recent article, the New York Times reports that Chicago city planners are working to respond to drastic climate changes projected to occur in our region of Illinois within just a few decades:

“Climate scientists have told city planners that based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century.

So, Chicago is getting ready for a wetter, steamier future. Public alleyways are being repaved with materials that are permeable to water. The white oak, the state tree of Illinois, has been banned from city planting lists, and swamp oaks and sweet gum trees from the South have been given new priority. Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.”

Freshwater swamp in Florida, image courtesy of Wikipedia

Of course it’s very good news that Chicago is leading the way in preparing for the effects of climate change, but I wonder whether these efforts to control and manage nature—improving drainage systems to deal with increased precipitation, or combating termites that thrive where winters are mild—go far enough in understanding the challenges and opportunities that this change in climate will bring. Shouldn’t truly green design go beyond infrastructure maintenance to consider the bigger picture of how people relate to their environment?

Chicago’s climate affects more than just drainage strategies; it is woven through the whole fabric of life in that city. For example, Chicago politics is a winter sport, legendary for being colorful and frequently bizarre; maybe because on some level Chicagoans crave excitement to liven up the long grim evenings? Or more prosaically, the fact that weather during municipal elections is pretty much guaranteed to be miserable means that voter turnout will always be limited to the hardcore and the self-interested—the leaders who get elected are often not the ones who would appeal to reasonable people, because reasonable people do not go outside in February if they can possibly help it.

At the same time, Northern Illinois' long hard winters make summers in Chicago all the sweeter—few cities in America can match its exuberant flowering of summer concerts, neighborhood festivals, and picnic parties by the lake.

Chicago Half Marathon, image courtesy Wikipedia

These traditions are part of the pattern of life in our region, extending across generations, but this pattern has been shaped by the environment, a constant through time--until now. So much of what people have thought about what it means to live in Chicago or to be a Chicagoan is bound up with Chicago’s climate. Saul Bellow famously began his novel The Adventures of Augie March: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way…” What if Chicago were no longer a somber city? Would being from Chicago still mean the same things about a person if life here were more like life in Baton Rouge?

Sad as it will be to lose some of these links to Chicago’s past, though, the fact that planners are aware of the shift in climate this far in advance offers some wonderful opportunities. In some ways, residents of the greater Chicago area are fortunate to be able to design for a new climate when we are perhaps more knowledgeable and wiser than we were when many urban zones with a comparably hot climate were developed. We have the opportunity to work with the climate to build better human communities: rather than fighting the environment by creating a sprawl of self-contained igloos as seen in Phoenix and other cities “built by air conditioning,” Chicago can embrace its relatively concentrated neighborhood design and the example set by its rich housing stock of bungalows and other houses with open front porch architecture to promote neighborliness, use of common spaces, walking and biking; to become a close-knit, livable summer city.

Chicago bungalow, image courtesy Wikipedia

And if nothing else, it will finally make sense to have a system of elevated transit stations completely exposed to the elements when Chicago is no longer terrorized by howling arctic winds three quarters of the year…