Daniel Burnham probably never said his most famous words.

But we’re in a time when we should be rethinking the plan and its mandates for the 21st century, not holding it up as scripture.

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But a lot of the plan is now simply unthinkable, and many of Burnham and Bennett’s projections are based on premises that history has proved false. They believed Chicago would have a population of 13.25 million people by 1950, and that the major modes of transportation would be walking, horse-drawn vehicles, and railroads. They proposed dozens of miles of new diagonal streets to make it faster and easier to navigate the city by those methods. Even then, these streets would have been tremendously expensive to build, thanks to the enormous amount of property that would have to be condemned. But Burnham and Bennett argued that widespread demolition would be acceptable because Chicago has “no buildings possessing either historical or picturesque value.”

That’s the logic behind the recent proposal by the Friends of the Parks to extend the 26 miles of extant lakefront landfill park with what they call “The Last Four Miles,” two miles of disused and mostly industrial land on the far south side and a two-mile mix of private beaches, rocky college-campus breakwater, and street-end beaches and parks in Edgewater and Rogers Park. They assure everyone that this idea is not a stalking horse for extending Lake Shore Drive or providing new marinas and other amenities for the leisure class. No, it’s a logical and inevitable expression of Burnham’s commandment that “the Lake front by right belongs to the people. . . . Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated by individuals to the exclusion of the people . . .”

Or how about spending $400 million to repave Chicago streets with pothole-resistant concrete? Doing that would improve the quality of life of more Chicagoans than 500 more acres of recreational space along a lakefront that already provides 2,000 acres of recreational space.

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will participate in discussions following performances of Our Future Metropolis: Mr. D.H. Burnham Presents a Plain Talk for the Development of Chicago atLookingglass Theater Company Mon-Tue 7/21-7/22, 7:30 PM, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, $10-$25.