One of the great pleasures of my 28-year run as the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic was seeing how wrong the artist of Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain got it.
The artist, Spain’s Jaume Plensa, hoped that people would feel as if they were walking on water as they traversed the liquid skim between the fountain’s glass-block towers. The experience would be serene, contemplative, a chance for ordinary mortals to partake of the divine. Instead, children, some from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, turned the fountain into a raucous water park, shrieking with delight as the towers’ supersized human faces shot arcs of water on their heads.
This unexpected piece of urban theater was so compelling that other parkgoers stopped to watch it. For a few fleeting moments, the spectacle erased the fault lines of race and class that split Chicago and its suburbs. Common ground unearthed common humanity.
We should keep that joyous scene and its intimations of equality in mind as Mayor Lori Lightfoot and multiple challengers battle to determine who runs Chicago and the direction the city takes in the post-pandemic, post-George Floyd era. For while the need to stanch gun violence likely will dominate the campaign, another issue, no less urgent, deserves to be on the agenda: building a more equitable Chicago.
You can’t have a good city unless you have a just city, one that provides equal opportunities for all its residents to thrive. But despite the dazzle of Millennium Park, Chicago infamously has become a tale of two cities — actually, three cities, if we account for its shrinking middle class, as well as its growing cohorts of rich and poor.
The equity issue assumed fresh relevance recently when Lightfoot lobbied recalcitrant aldermen to back the creation of a new transit tax increment financing district to bankroll the $959 million local share of the $3.6 billion, mostly federally funded extension of the CTA’s Red Line from 95th Street to 130th Street. Some aldermen object to directing so much TIF funding to the project, saying gas taxes or more federal funds should be used instead. Never mind that a similar tax increment financing district supports the current Red Line-Purple Line modernization on the city’s North Side.
[ Kate Lowe: Debate over TIFs should not delay a critical extension of the CTA’s Red Line ]
What, exactly, is “equity”? The word is tossed off so frequently and carelessly these days, along with “diversity” and “inclusion,” that it’s practically become a buzzword, an easily digested catchphrase whose complexities are easy to gloss over.
In the world of city planning, “equity” typically means fair treatment for neighborhoods that historically have gotten the short end of the stick. Equity-driven policies and programs seek to address — or redress — the bitter legacy of practices like redlining that denied loans and insurance to worthy applicants, stunting African American opportunities to build multigenerational wealth. Equity measures also are aimed at combating the impact of disinvestment that robbed minority neighborhoods of supermarkets and other stores, as well as city policies that directed spending for parks and transit to less-needy white neighborhoods
Yet the conventional meaning of “equity” fails to adequately convey the broader benefits of equity-driven urban design. In a new book, “Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago,” I argue for a reframing of the term so it encompasses the revitalization of struggling neighborhoods and the rejuvenation of the spaces we share — the pubic realm, from streets and sidewalks to transit stations and bike lanes to parks and plazas.
The proposed expansion of the term “equity” derives from an unlikely source: a financial meaning of the term…
Read More: How do we achieve equity-driven urban design in Chicago?