Reinventing the American City

Five years ago, our family moved out of Manhattan to a suburb about 50 miles north of New York City. We moved for a lot of reasons, including access to good public schools and nature -- lots of nearby woods and open sky. What we didn't anticipate was our new reliance on the automobile. Though our house is within easy walking distance of the town's elementary school, we didn't want our son walking there on a road without sidewalks. So we drove him every morning. We drive to the supermarket, to piano lessons, to doctor's appointments, to movie theaters and restaurants.

On West 96th Street, where we used to live, there is a cross-town bus stop and a subway station. Our children walked to school or took the public bus. We shopped for groceries across the street. I took the subway to work. Though I appreciate the verdant meadows and deep woods near my suburban home, West 96th Street is, in many ways, far greener. City life doesn't suit everyone, but suburban life doesn't suit the needs of the planet. The old tale of the city mouse and the country mouse needs some revision.

We have all heard about the problems of "sprawl" and have probably read about its antithesis, "smart growth." But this issue's cover story, by our senior editor Laura Wright, goes beyond the jargon and immerses us in the street-level realities of a vast, chaotic metropolis -- Chicago -- and how it could be transformed into an energy-efficient, livable, vibrant collection of communities that help solve the climate-change crisis. Wright compares smart urban planning to "recycling," except in this case we are recycling and upgrading our man-made environment -- underused rail lines, neglected apartment houses and office structures. "Following the logic of smart growth," she writes, "when we build new we build in, not out: office buildings, homes, and stores go in the spaces that exist within the areas we've already developed, not out on the fringe where they gobble up farmland and countryside. This makes it possible for more people to utilize the infrastructure we have." In this way, we reduce energy consumption and conserve resources and open space.

Wright takes us on a journey from the suburban outskirts of Chicagoland -- the 4,071-square-mile metropolitan region that encompasses 284 municipalities and seven counties -- to an inner-city neighborhood, with a visit in between to a downtrodden blue-collar suburb on the verge of revitalization. Wright visits these disparate locations because they are all essential parts of the grand whole. For humans to live sustainably on the planet (whether in Chicago, Lagos, or Shanghai), buildings, roads, sidewalks, bikeways, railways, bus lanes, homes, shops, and town squares must all be intelligently linked. By contrast, unbridled growth -- new malls, housing developments, highways -- is not progress but metastasis. And while Chicagoland is hardly a Midwestern utopia, Wright shows how it is lurching forward, prodded by a small army of urban and community planners, some visionary, others stolidly practical, but all informed by a sensible and necessary grasp of our shared human landscape.