Earlier this month at the Metropolitan Planning Council’s big annual luncheon at the Hyatt Regency, Americas at Google president and keynote speaker Margo Georgiadis (former COO of Groupon) said the Google of the future will be an indispensable personal assistant, not only answering our questions, but anticipating them.

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Daniel Burnham’s plan for Chicago is the one that laid out the gorgeous part of our Paris on the Prairie. The 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan is the one the city outsourced to a Canadian consulting firm, which jetted in for a series of public meetings and then went back to Toronto, where it incubated a plan cum wish list with ten big-picture priorities, 36 recommendations, 241 initiatives, a sky’s-the-limit potential cost, and no specific advice about how to finance it.

The Metropolitan Planning Council said in a statement announcing the award that it was impressed with DCASE’s “wide range of initiatives.” And DCASE commissioner Michelle Boone, who was on hand to accept it, said in the same announcement that “half of the 241 initiatives in the plan have been addressed.”

The graphic lists 19 “highlights of initiatives completed since the Plan was released,” with an emphasis on tallies. For example:

  • That the city’s been giving out million-dollar arts grants for years ($1 million in CityArts Grants in 2009, for example, when that was only one of four grant programs the Department of Cultural Affairs administered).
  • That more than 200 restaurants were already participating in Chicago Restaurant Week in 2012.
  • And that 50,000 children read 1.2 million books in the library’s 2010 summer reading program.

So, the planning council award notwithstanding, DCASE is telling us essentially zip about what, if anything, the Chicago Cultural Plan has accomplished in its first year.

“There’s a lot of recommendations in the cultural plan,” Dorf says. “You can’t do them all at once. We want to make sure that there are priorities and focus. We’re working with a very friendly administration, a mayor who believes in culture. But we’re going into this with our eyes open: it’s our job, in a cooperative way, to hold their feet to the fire.”