This book traces Chicago's urban development and its relationship to water over a 150-year period. In doing so, Harold L. Platt accounts for the political, technical and social factors that gave rise to Chicago's flooding and water quality problems. Setting this story within a context of climate change allows Platt to demonstrate how one city has adapted to deal with water management issues and demonstrates how past infrastructural decisions create path-dependency that constrains opportunities in the present. In order to show the relationship of policy to climate, the book is organized into two parts. The first part (chapters 1–3) cover the ‘dry’ period of weather whilst the second part (chapters 4–6) cover the ‘wet’ period of increasing precipitation.
Chicago, as noted in the introduction, ‘is a city built on water’ (p. 1); namely, the prairie wetland between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Technological developments in the eighteenth century enabled suburban expansion for a growing population and, consequently, urban sprawl contributed to many challenging water issues. However, the ‘solutions’ to these issues were Promethean in attitude and underscored the demarcations between humans and nature. The introductory chapter sets these issues out well and focuses on how issues of cost-effectiveness drove the options.
Platt demonstrates how the early conservation and environmental movements resisted techno-managerialism through grassroots initiatives. In chapter 1, we learn that the early architect-planners active in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Daniel Burnham and Jens Jensen, were foremost in injecting conservation values when addressing the problems of over-development. They argued that the introduction of parks and open spaces would encourage healthy activities and improve the aesthetics of Chicago's built environment. Chapter 2 covers the period between 1910 and 1920 where urban development was largely in private hands and led to some neighbourhoods losing out in terms of water management. Sanitary authorities tended not to undertake comprehensive planning and the resultant piecemeal approach, given on a contract-by-contract basis, meant that ‘investors in commerce and industry got priority over the stakeholders in sanitation and conservation’ in a way that largely supported the incumbent political masters (p. 77). The period of the New Deal is covered in chapter 3 where the benefits of natural flood management were recognized in a limited way. For example, the 1934 development scheme for the Skokie Lagoons – part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District – turned a piece of marshland into a public park that also acted to control flooding and was considered to be a legacy of the nascent conservation movement.
Part 2 begins with continued suburban sprawl from 1945 to 1965 in chapter 4. Here, population growth in largely single-family homes was accompanied by civic organizations not only popularizing the outdoor movement but also highlighting environmental concerns around polluted rivers, and inspired by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). By this time, the various heroic technological improvements to address Chicago's sanitary issues had resulted in the loss of natural drainage areas and floods increased in frequency and intensity. A major flood in 1954 also represented a turning point where citizens were motivated to offer alternative flood control strategies. Nevertheless, techno-optimism persisted: this was the period when Chicago's Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) was mooted to construct a large project of tunnels to drain water.
Chapter 5 thus covers the bringing of TARP to fruition as another piece of heroic infrastructural development against the backdrop of increasingly intense and frequent floods. Juxtaposing this, the chapter covers the mobilization of environmental grassroots movement to run counter to municipal plans and argues for nature to be reconciled to the city. This was partly underscored by a realization that the authorities who were in charge of anti-pollution measures, such as the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago, had dumped toxic sedimentation into Lake Michigan. Chapter 6 covers the period from 1985 to the present day when the first phases of TARP was open and Chicago's resistance to compliance with the Clean Water Act (1972) lessened. The retirement of Mayor Daley in 2011 and subsequent mayoral decisions made Chicago's river central to the city's image. Natural flood control measures were further promoted and stronger links were made between the city and its natural elements.
The concluding chapter makes the case for using an understanding of the past in order to inform future policy at a number of scales. These are around the importance of involving all stakeholders from infrastructure developers to citizens. In addition, Platt argues that water and land management need to be integrated. Thirdly, such integrated management requires co-ordination across a number of governance organizations within a municipality. Lastly, Platt urges us to learn to design with nature rather than against it. Platt's book therefore offers timely lessons as policy-makers continue to grapple with the demands of implementing new infrastructural projects in a climate that is known to be changing rapidly.
