World Water Crisis Forum
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The idea came about in one frenzied week last November, when Dunn, Felsen, and a handful of others worked 16-hour days and pulled a couple of all-nighters at UrbanLab to prepare for a contest sponsored by the History Channel to promote its Engineering an Empire series. The channel gave select architects in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles seven days to come up with a design for their city 100 years from now, something that “like the marvels of past civilizations, would have the staying power to endure for centuries to come.”
Dunn and Felsen propose that the city switch over to a decentralized all-natural water treatment and recycling system that would double the city’s parkland. A series of 50 “eco-boulevards” spaced every half mile from Rogers Park to Roseland would run east-west from Lake Michigan to the subcontinental divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins at about Harlem Avenue–thin green ribbons running across the city that would replace pavement with green space, greenhouses, and wetland for the treatment of waste and storm water.
Such a project would require a certain fixity of purpose not often displayed by political bodies. But Dunn and Felsen think that just as parks raised land values and attracted developers in the 19th century, the prospect of green parkland within a quarter mile of every property in Chicago might be sufficient incentive to keep things moving. And what better occasion to jump-start their proposal than the 2016 Olympics, where a housing complex that cleaned its own used water and returned it to Lake Michigan might show the world a thing or two?
