I'll get your attention for just a moment, and please get started on lunch.
We've got a tight timeline today, so please get started on your lunch,
but if you could, give me your attention for just a moment.
I'm Dan Gibbons.
On behalf of the City Club of Chicago, welcome.
Welcome to Fogo de Chao.
If you weren't here last week for another program,
I mentioned that there was a small fire at Maggiano's a week or so ago.
Everyone is safe.
Thank you to our fire department.
And we'll be getting back in there soon.
But for the meantime, bear with us as we change up the format a little bit,
especially the seating and the menu.
Hopefully you'll enjoy it.
as we get everything situated
and I do see a few more seats over here
if we're still trying to get everybody in
I'd like to take a moment
to thank as we always
do our sponsors for helping
get us here today
great group here the Field Foundation
Daniel Ash and his team
are here
Forvis Mazars
M. Harris and Kern
Melissa and
And Jara, thank you.
They are our partners in this and have been very helpful in organizing, so thank you.
McCormick Place is here, Loretta and her team.
This is the Metropolitan Planning Council, MPC.
I think Dan Lurie is here.
The Mid-America Carpenters Regional Council.
Gentlemen, I saw many of you.
Thank you for being here.
Navy Pier, Chonan team.
The Morton Arboretum, of course.
quite a presence here, University of Illinois System, also a Civic Level member, Wheeler
Kearns Architects, White and Company is here, Pat Cermak, one of our great Civic Level members,
and I believe Mark White is with us today, so welcome, and thank you all for your constant
support of City Club.
Of course, we also have our, we don't have favorites, another favorite chancellor, the
University of Illinois-Chicago, UIC Chancellor Mari Lynn Miranda with U of I. I'm going to let
you eat, not for very long. I think the meat keeps coming or something here. So just enjoy it. But
please, in a couple minutes, I'll ask for your attention again and make a couple more introductions
and we'll get underway with the rest of our program. So enjoy your lunch. Thanks for being
here and finding this new place hello again good afternoon thank you for your attention
again i'm dan gibbons from city club welcome back uh i'm going to ask the the servers are
continuing to serve please continue to enjoy your meal at least for these next couple of minutes
we have a couple special guests that we're going to invite up here and um and we certainly want
to keep this going because there's a lot to discuss today. So enjoy and please if you could
hold your applause. We're joined by so many incredible people today. If I could get your
attention. I guess we can't really hold applause for this because in our presence today we do have
a special guest who is the mayor of Chicago and that's Mayor Brandon Johnson. He will be coming
in just a moment and you're going to hear from him. We're excited to have Mayor Johnson here.
here today and we're going to hear so much more from him on September 30th in just a couple of
weeks when he comes back to City Club. We have so many government leaders. We have Commissioner
Kenya Merritt is here, Commissioner Sear Boatwright, Loretta Clark from McCormick, Mayor Rory Hoskins,
Mayor Terry Darcy from Joliet, Christina Passione-Zayas from the Mayor's Office,
Aaron Connolly is here. I believe Aaron Connolly, after a great stint as the Mayor's Communications Director, is leaving the city.
Thank you, Aaron, for being a great partner to us.
Bridget Gaynor, Commissioner Bridget Gaynor, is here.
Kari Yee from President Preckwinkle's office.
I think I mentioned Loretta Clark.
David Kennedy is here from Wintrust.
Cindy Rubick from the Planning Department.
A great group of government leaders.
We appreciate all of you and what you do.
Of course, the foundation leaders are always here at City Club, for instance,
Andrea Sands, Daniel Ashe, Julia Stash, who has crossed over the civic
and the foundation and government, wonderful civic leaders.
As are so many of these folks, I'll go through Ed Mazur from our chair emeritus
of City Club, Nora Daly of the Arts Council, Aaron Alleman,
You're going to hear from soon at CMAP.
Eleanor Gorski, I just saw her right in front of me, from Architecture Center.
Tom Katarek, recently named Chair of NIDA.
Thank you for your service, Tom.
Dan Laurie, I mentioned.
Carlos Nelson, great community leader.
Dr. Nguze, Ezeke Ngoze, again, someone who has straddled government, private, public sector.
Katia Nukes is here.
Elena Harkness from Currents.
Brooke Flanagan from the Steppenwolf Theater.
Speaking of theaters, Lou Raisin is here in the Chicago Cultural Stadium.
John McCarter, a legendary civic leader is back.
Thank you, John McCarter, for being here.
And Jimmy Dower, another great community leader with Urban Initiatives.
What a group.
Of course, we have business.
I mentioned Pat Sermak in white.
Clayco is here.
Jara and Melissa are partners in all of this.
David Riefman, another great civic level member with the City Club, Sandeep Nain.
We've got incredible folks.
And then, of course, academic representative, Chancellor Miranda, Teresa Cordova from the Great Cities Institute, and Labor.
I mentioned our friends in the Carpenters Union.
So that shows you all what City Club is.
We are, to my knowledge, the only organization that are bringing folks from all of these sectors together
on a very regular basis to have these in-depth, important conversations that help lead our city forward.
And we couldn't do it with all of you who are showing up every day.
So thank you for continuing to show up and do what you do.
This today was all done in partnership with World Business Chicago.
and I'm going to introduce Phil in just a moment but I want to mention he is
going to make some remarks and make another special introduction and then
eventually we will have and you'll hear more about these folks but we'll have
Jill Kosky, President and CEO of the Morton Arboretum and Brett Weidel, Donny
Donahue and Donnie Zellifreau from NKSK.
Excuse me if I did not pronounce that correctly.
What's that?
I tried.
Okay, thank you for giving me a little grace there.
So you're going to hear more from all them and about what they're doing.
They have been selected out of 200 and some projects for this Horizon Lines Visions for Chicago 2050 effort
that I think you all are very well aware of.
And this has been an initiative of World Business Chicago under the leadership of our next speaker,
something that we're very proud to be affiliated with and help bring the spotlight to.
So please, if you would join me.
And before I do that, I also think hopefully we have some time at the end of all this for questions.
So keep those going.
And if you have a question, either find me or I'll try to find you a little bit later when we have a microphone.
But if you would, please welcome back to City Club of Chicago to move our program forward.
The president and CEO of World Business Chicago, where he helps lead efforts to strengthen our economy,
attract businesses to the city and position our wonderful city for long-time growth.
Welcome back to City Club.
Phil Clement from World Business Chicago. Thank you, Phil, for your partnership.
All right. Dan, first I want to start out with saying what you have done with the City Club is remarkable.
The transformation, I got to say in my day-to-day work,
if somebody will come up as being important to talk to about some important issue,
I'll look at my email, and sure enough, they're the next speaker here.
So it's always relevant and action-packed what you're doing.
So thanks for hosting us, and I can't help but observe that I think our friend Lori Healy
would be delighted to see us working together on this particular topic, so near and dear to her heart.
I want to take a moment and say thank you to a few people.
The first is here in the front row.
We've got the WBC team.
Today is a long day coming.
We've been working on this for over two years.
So thank you, WBC team.
I also want to thank everybody who entered the contest.
There were so many that put their energy to it.
You know, when I say the 2016 Cubs or the 1995 Bulls or the 1984 Bears
or the 2005 White Sox, I'm guessing everybody has names come to mind.
I want to thank our judges who are literally the equivalent of those teams
in getting stuff done in Chicago.
So we've got, I mean, literally an all-star lineup.
Commissioner Merritt, Commissioner Boatwright, Joel Brammeyer,
Julia Stash mentioned, Eleanor Gorski, Nora Daly, who had too many roles,
so I had to just drop out all the roles of everybody,
our Deputy Mayor, Max Budovich, and Representative Kirk Diller.
So thank you so much for your efforts, for your thought, your energy.
You really propelled everything forward.
So actually, can we give them a round of applause?
Because they put in hours and hours and hours.
So we're going to begin this presentation welcoming you to Horizon Lines,
which is the second Burnham phase of our economic plan Chicago 2050.
Phase one was built on hardcore economics.
Phase two is built to stir the soul.
So welcome.
Welcome to a city where the world is looking again at our culture,
our artists, our skyline, and our lakefront.
Welcome to the safest summer since 1965.
Welcome to the city that Elphageo just ranked as the most climate-resilient major city in the world.
I'm going to go a little faster on the next group, but welcome to the home of billion-dollar development rising on the long-vacant Chicago Spire site,
the future Midwest headquarters for some 3,000 Google employees, the future home of Chicago Fires McDonald's Park,
the Bulls' new 1901 complex,
and a city where global companies like Universal, Mars, and Ferraro
are choosing to invest, expand, and build for the future.
And, of course, I want to welcome you to Fago de Chau.
All of us in one room this time, which is, I think, a great achievement,
and it shows that Chicago really does bounce back from fires.
uh so chicago is clearly having a moment from presidents to popes messages of hope
were coming from chicago and the world is paying attention and you can see that same confidence
and investments taking shape all around us i mentioned the spire and google but there are
tens of billions of dollars in investment in play today in chicago last week we cut the ribbon on a
literal bellwether of Chicago's LaSalle Street reimagining.
The building, the bellwether, opened the first completed office
to residential conversion under LaSalle Street reimagined,
delivering well over 100 homes with another 1,700 on the way.
On the southeast side,
$5.5 billion in public and private investment is building the Illinois
quantum and microelectronics.
with the ambition of helping deliver the world's first commercially viable, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
O'Hare, already the number one airport, is investing billions of dollars to continue transforming
one of the world's great aviation hubs, and high-speed rail, you may have noticed, is back as a viable topic.
I think we got some of the O'Hare flyer over there, which is great.
And on the far south side, we're seeing the red line extension moving forward.
So some of these things are new construction.
Some of them are taking iconic buildings and giving them new life.
Some of it's infrastructure, technology, housing, and entirely new developments.
But taken together, it tells us something important.
People are investing in Chicago's future.
And that confidence extends well beyond capital.
and our arts and our culture are being recognized globally too.
Chicago's reputation around the world is increasingly that of a city doing big things
as we've done throughout our history.
And that is where Horizon Lines fits in.
Horizon Lines is very much a part of that story,
a way to keep fueling Chicago's belief in what comes next.
Chicago is doing what it has always done when we're at our best,
gather around big ideas, and giving ourselves permission to imagine something better.
So six months ago, we asked Chicago a simple question.
What comes next?
What is the big idea that could reshape the city for the next 25 years?
And honestly, we did not know what kind of response we would get.
Think about two and a half years ago.
My kids would say, I mean mood.
You know, cities were tired from the troubles we had faced, and some doubted whether cities could still do it or still wanted to do big, ambitious things.
But the response has been extraordinary.
Our open call resulted in hundreds of submissions from Chicagoans of all ages and backgrounds.
One of my favorite came from Roman, a nine-year-old, who imagined a steel and light civic landmark inspired by a symbol of making a wish.
the Origami Crane. His idea was all Chicagoans could climb to the head of this crane and make
a wish for Chicago. It was a beautiful submission. And I think there's an image of it there. Each
submission started from a different place. Each one saw a different opportunity. But together
they told us something important. Chicago is ready for something bold. Before we announced
the winner, we take a few minutes for us to walk through what finalists imagined. But we also want
to say that as important as announcing the winners, it is also all about recognizing what is possible
when we come together to benefit our city, our families, our businesses, and our future generations
of Chicagoans. It is also about documenting these ideas in a way that we believe can be permanently
inserted into the civic record around Chicago's future. So I invite you to turn your attention
to the video screen and look back at horizon lines. Chicago has always been a city willing
to imagine what seems impossible. We reversed a river. We invented the skyscraper. We're always
reaching to the sky and doing big, bold things. Horizon Lines asks a simple question. What could
Chicago become by 2050? The future of Chicago is in what we're willing to
imagine. Horizon lines invited Chicagoans to think well beyond the next year, the
next development cycle, or even the next decade, and imagine the city we could
build over the next 25 years. Six visions, six radically different ways to imagine
Chicago's future. Imagine a Chicago in which we build on the historic legacy of
the boulevards head-on, so that we can make life more joyful, more connected, and more alive.
Our proposal, Wonderways, reimagines the historic Chicago boulevards as a series of connected
climate commons.
Imagine a Chicago in which the whole city is a living green network of tree-centric neighborhoods
that are resilient to climate change.
Green City Rising imagines the entire city of Chicago as an arboretum, where every
resident benefits from a healthy tree canopy imagine a chicago in which inside every block
behind every house a second neighborhood is quietly taking shape along the alleys
and what we're asking is a simple question what would happen if this 1900 miles of alley
A network can do more.
Imagine a Chicago where the food district becomes an attraction and an economic generator.
In 25 years, grown in Chicago will mean something.
The first generation of graduates from AgriFlats will be running a new industry in the metro area.
Imagine a Chicago in which we can leverage the resources that we already throw away
into better jobs for anyone within our community.
I look at a future in which Chicago creates jobs from reuse.
I imagine a reconnected Chicago
to bring transportation with people at the center.
We imagine a Chicago where infrastructure
no longer divides neighborhoods and communities,
but brings them together.
The point isn't that there's one answer.
The point is that Chicago has always been at its best
when we give people the permission to think big.
These ideas ask us to think about how we live,
how we move, how we grow, and how we connect,
and what kind of city we want to leave to that next generation.
Because imagining the future is not just about buildings or infrastructure.
It's about people and the choices we make together.
And it's about the Chicago we choose to build.
So what you just saw is the range of imagination that Horizon Lines unleashed.
Each of these six finalists approach Chicago from a different angle,
but together they offer something bigger, six distinct answers to what the city could become next.
So I'm going to start with ReLoop.
ReLoop is a permanent public district dedicated to the circular economy.
Imagine a place for reclaimed building materials, industrial byproducts,
and items too often treated as waste become raw materials for new businesses,
a place where local makers, builders, artists, entrepreneurs, and residents come to repair instead of replace,
where tools can be shared, computers can be refurbished, appliances can be given a second life,
and visitors can discover a one-of-a-kind handcrafted goods.
The economies are clear. Ton for ton, reuse creates significantly more jobs than landfilling.
So this is not only waste reduction, it's workforce development, it's small business creation, it's climate action, and it's all ready to start now.
The next idea is agri-flats. Chicago has always been an important national hub for food.
Agri-Flats would amplify that role in the future.
Picture year-round food production using a fraction of the water without pesticides
in a controlled environment with greenhouses that sit right alongside of their live-work units for the farmers.
Thirteen aspiring growers launch their businesses in one place.
They share resources, knowledge, and customers.
A single location creates 170 permanent jobs, and the food, ripened on the vine, selected for taste instead of durability for transport, reaches restaurants and markets within a day.
This addresses food deserts, food security, climate action, and jobs.
The third finalist is called Reconnecting Communities, and I'll mention that this is my dad's favorite.
Chicago's expressways carved through vibrant neighborhoods and created barriers that still divide communities today.
Reconnecting Communities asks, what if we kept those highways and use reconstruction to reconnect the city?
Imagine new parks and development where there is concrete today,
while also rethinking the infrastructure beneath from transit and utilities to fiber and electrification.
It is ambitious, it is transformative, and it turns a barrier into an opportunity.
So now, the third frontage.
I love it when a great idea hides in plain sight and the right team comes along and sees it.
Chicago has 1,900 miles of alleys.
For over a century,
They've been purely utilitarian. Trash collection, utilities, parking.
The third frontage asks the question, what if your alley became the front door instead of the back door?
What if you added accessory dwellings, dwelling units and housing, green infrastructure, community gardens, trees, porches that face the alley instead of away from it?
all coordinated through a neighborhood compact,
a voluntary agreement about affordability, maintenance, and anti-displacement.
That is an idea that scales across the entire city.
It uses what's already there.
It adds housing, climate infrastructure, and community life all at once.
Then we have wonderways.
Chicago's historic boulevards span 28 miles,
but too many function today as little more than traffic corridors.
Wonderways asks, what if those boulevards became true community spaces,
while also helping Chicago become greener, cooler, and more resilient?
That means more tree canopy, native plantings, rain gardens, continuous trails,
and year-round places for people to gather, play, and connect.
Beautification, yes, and climate resilience together.
Public space and public health.
And importantly, it's designed to build over time, starting with pilot segments and working through existing capital improvement cycles.
Finally, Green City Rising, building on Chicago's identity and our motto, Herbs in Horto, a city in the garden,
Green City Rising imagines a citywide network of neighborhood Arboretta.
But the power is local.
Communities define what the Arboretta looks like in their neighborhoods.
They choose plantings, help shape the spaces, and see their own histories reflected in the landscape.
The climate benefits are also real.
More canopy, cleaner air, better stormwater management.
But the deeper idea is stewardship, creating green spaces that truly belong to the people who live around them.
and with early examples showing
Promise Green City Rising
ask whether Chicago can take that neighborhood
model and scale it across
the city, helping lead
a global urban movement
toward greener, healthier urban life
so
those are the six
finalists
six, yeah
okay, six ideas
six different ways of looking at our future
each one ambitious
each one grounded in the belief that the city can continue to reinvent itself,
and now comes the part that everyone's been waiting for.
More than 200 judges helped evaluate these ideas,
followed by a 10-member jury charged with making the final decision,
and as you would expect, that decision was not easy.
So it is my pleasure now to invite the Mayor of Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson,
to the podium to officially announce the winning finalists.
Mayor, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Phil, for that introduction.
Thank you for having me back here.
And good afternoon, everyone.
I'm grateful to be joined also by my chief of staff, Christina Pacione-Zaez.
All right, everyone, this is the moment that we all have been waiting for.
More than 200 judges have participated in this process.
then a jury of 10 were given the difficult task of making the final
decision and this was not an easy decision in fact they debated challenged
one another and were not unanimous sounds like city council in fact at the
end and in the end they could not choose just one but you can only have one mayor
so don't get any ideas. Not because two ideas are better than one, but because the jury saw
something more powerful. Two ideas that together could accomplish what neither could accomplish
alone. And so today
I have the honor of announcing these two amazing winners, but let this be a testament of what it means for us to continue to coalesce and build coalition across this city.
Black, brown, white, Asian, young, old, no matter what side of town you live on, this is the city of Chicago, and we all should do our part to defend the people of our beloved city.
And so with that, the winners of the Horizon Lines competition are Green City Rising and Wonder Ways.
Congratulations to both teams, and hopefully we are congratulating our Cubs and Sox that they're both in the playoffs.
But what began six months ago as a question, what if, has brought us to two visions for Chicago's future that the jury believes can become even stronger by working together.
And that is important because Chicago has never accomplished big things alone.
We accomplish them by bringing ideas, institutions, neighborhoods, and people together around a shared sense of possibility.
Today is not only a celebration, but it is the beginning of the next chapter of these two wonderful ideas.
And before I head out, I want to leave you with this.
This is Chicago at its best.
It is our ability to come together in the interest of the entire city, business, government, civic institutions, philanthropy, and community.
Different people bring different resources, different perspectives, and different responsibilities to the one table.
But when Chicago decides that something matters, we have a profound, rich history of figuring out how to get it done.
We reversed the flow of a river, created Millennium Park,
and built the transportation and logistics networks that helped to make Chicago the center of commerce.
And these achievements came from different moments in our history and different kinds of partnerships.
But they all share something important.
People that are willing to think beyond what existed and work together to build what came next.
And that is the spirit that I see in Horizon Lines.
It has been an amazing journey, and it's been amazing to watch this effort grow from an idea into a citywide invitation to imagine Chicago's future.
And I was proud to contribute to the conversation through the Chicago 2050 essay series.
And now I'm excited to turn the podium back over to Phil and invite him to tell us more about why the jury believes that Green City Rising and Wonderways belong together, what happens next, and then invite the teams up to speak for themselves.
So, again, congratulations again to our winners.
Thank you for the courage of asking what if.
God bless you and God bless the greatest freakish city in the world, Chicago.
I think the winners are going for a photo in the back so congratulations to
Green City Rising and Wonder Ways I want to pause on what just happened because
this is not the outcome we expected when horizon lines began and there was a lot
of debate about it I loved the moment of in the room we imagined a singular
structure. You know, one winner, one idea, kind of keeping in Chicago's long history of architecture
and construction ambition. But the jury saw something new. They saw two great ideas that
belonged together. And in many ways, this is very Chicago. Our legendary second city has been built
on a phrase, yes and. And this is definitely a very yes and solution. Green City Rising and
wonder ways are better together one provides the roots the other provides the spine and the
connectivity together they bring us back to our city's motto herbs and horto city in a garden
a phrase that we can sometimes forget as we grow but an incredible forward-thinking part of our
city's legacy, where nature
Infrastructure, neighborhoods, and civic life grow side by side.
And what struck me throughout this competition was how many of the ideas we received were rooted in climate solutions.
Our internal leader, Elle Rommel, on this project, she said,
People love trees.
And that's not a total surprise for a beautiful city by the lake.
We are a city, we're a region, and a state of people, businesses, and institutions
that care deeply about one another and about the planet we all share.
People gave their time, their talent, and imagination to ideas that could make Chicago bigger and bolder, for sure,
but also greener, cooler, healthier, and more resilient for generations to come.
And while they're focused today on some extraordinary finalists,
Every one of these six finalists, I think, has a future, as do their submissions.
At the core, Horizon Lines is about opening a broader conversation, and that's our invitation today.
Stay in the conversation.
Raise your hand to get involved.
Bring your ideas, your energy, your expertise, and your investment,
because the challenges of today and the ones still ahead will require all of us.
And if Horizon Lines has shown us anything, it's that Chicago is full of people who are ready to meet those challenges.
Now you get to hear directly from the visionaries that we honor today.
First, it's my pleasure to invite Jill Kosky, President and CEO of the Mortem Arboretum, to the stage to share the vision and the pitch behind Green City Rising.
Jill?
Good afternoon. Trees do not have a seat at the table during our most critical community and
economic development conversations, and trees are not equitably distributed across the city of
Chicago. Yet, trees are essential civic infrastructure. In fact, the only type of
infrastructure that increases in value over time. Additionally, as we all experienced this summer,
there is an urgent and growing need to address the extreme weather in our communities due to
climate change. If we want all neighborhoods to be livable, beautiful, and sustainable,
Trees need a voice.
Green City Rising gives trees this voice and addresses these challenges.
It's an ambitious, equity-centered vision to turn Chicago into a city-wide arboretum,
a vibrant, interconnected network of tree-centric neighborhoods.
Green City Rising was inspired by the city's motto, Herbs in Horto, City in a Garden.
and we imagine Chicago in 2050 as a globally recognized city where people and trees thrive
together. It scales the Arboretum's long-standing work in urban and community forestry to a whole
new level across the entire city, especially in historically disinvested areas. And for every
dollar invested in trees, cities can double their return on investment. Across the region,
trees already yield more than $400 million in annual economic benefits. A healthy urban tree
canopy cools neighborhoods by up to 10 degrees and increases home values up to 10 percent.
Leafy tree-lined streets encourage shoppers to stay longer and spend more.
And people living in neighborhoods with lots of trees are simply healthier.
Green City Rising provides a rare opportunity for Chicago to rethink
and to be the national model for climate resiliency and environmental equity.
The Morton Arboretum's Chicago Region Trees Initiative has been leading urban and community forestry work like this for more than a decade,
and I'm delighted that many of the team are here with me today.
So our vision is tested and scalable.
We combine top-down and bottom-up approaches to government and community engagement.
We prioritize inclusive and equitable community partnership.
We've already stewarded more than $30 million in grants for urban forestry projects statewide
and awarded more than $17 million in grants to more than 200 community partners.
But we have a wait list.
Requests for funding far exceeds the funds available.
Communities across our region are lining up for this sort of support to plant trees in their neighborhoods to advance their green visions.
Our work and vision for Green City Rising has always been based in just this type of community-led action.
I have two great examples.
Our longtime partner, Blacks and Green, is developing a community resilience garden in Westwood Lawn.
This teaching and learning garden is part of Blacks and Greens' vision of a sustainable square mile
where residents walk to work, walk to shop, walk to learn, and walk to play.
Blacks and Greens founder Naomi Davis is here with us at lunch today.
Thank you, Naomi.
Similarly, Urban Growers Collectives seeks to establish an urban tree nursery in Auburn-Gresham
with a target of growing 10,000 trees annually.
A nursery like this would ensure that trees planted in Chicago are grown by Chicagoans,
keeping economic investment directly within these neighborhoods.
These two project ideas are at the ready, inspired by and meeting the needs of local residents.
So imagine projects like this multiplied across the entire city.
Projects that reflect the rich and diverse cultural identities of the neighborhoods we all call home.
Imagine a Chicago in which the whole city is a living green network of tree-centric neighborhoods that are resilient in the face of climate change.
People will want to be outside with nature and be outside to connect with one another.
People will want to live in the city, move to the city, and visit the city.
So, let's make Green City Rising a reality.
To do this, we need support from public and private partnership.
We need new and sustained funding.
An investment of $5 million annually in Green City Rising would allow us to continue the momentum of current levels of funding.
The funding that has supported hundreds of projects across the region.
By 2050, this level of funding would advance hundreds more projects, plant tens of thousands more trees, and ensure that your favorite trees in your neighborhood live a long and fruitful life.
Our vision, though, is not simply about planting trees.
It's about climate resilience, jobs, better health, and safer communities.
Green City Rising ensures that all neighborhoods realize the benefit of trees.
But most importantly, it's about listening to the people living in the neighborhoods of Chicago
and creating tree-filled neighborhoods that reflect their needs and their voices.
Chicago is a city that makes no little plans.
We must ensure that people and trees thrive together for decades to come.
We know that Green City Rising is a big vision, and we are ready.
Thank you.
All right.
And now, please welcome Brett Wydell, principal from MKSK,
and Donnie Donohue and Donnie Zilfro to show the vision behind Wonderways.
Thank you, Brett.
Cool.
Look at us all here together.
Okay, more than 150 years ago, Chicagoans faced the challenges of a rapidly growing city.
And in response, they built something remarkable, a 26-mile network of parks and boulevards
that brought nature, open space, and dignity directly into Chicago's neighborhoods.
Today, our challenges have evolved, but the need for these landscapes hasn't.
We're experiencing record heat, dangerous air quality, and increasingly disruptive storms.
And these impacts are not shared equally.
Neighborhoods with too few trees, too much pavement, and too little access to inviting public space often bear the greatest burdens.
And running through many of these communities is an incredible public asset that could be doing so much more.
Chicago has grown up around the boulevards, but the boulevards haven't grown with Chicago.
Too often, they're places we drive past rather than places we experience with too few reasons to stop and stay,
often cut off from the neighborhoods around them by wide roads and fast-moving traffic.
To imagine what comes next, we turn to an unlikely pair.
Daniel Burnham, architect of the 1909 plan of Chicago,
and Anna, a high school senior living along the boulevards today.
Together, they helped us ask,
what if we put the boulevards back to work for Chicago?
What if climate adaptation wasn't buried in a pipe underground
or tucked away behind a building,
but was something you could walk through, sit beneath, play within,
or experience as part of everyday life?
That's the idea behind Wonderways.
We reimagine Chicago's historic boulevard system as a connected climate commons,
a network of landscapes designed to work harder for the climate and for the people who live around them.
Imagine prairies and bioswales that capture stormwater,
mighty oak trees that shade our streets,
native landscapes filled with birds and pollinators,
but also places to play and to gather, to wander, discover, and explore something unexpected.
These are landscapes that reduce flooding, restore habitat, and cool our neighborhoods while making life more joyful, more connected, and more alive.
This is climate infrastructure you can touch.
And here's our favorite part.
They already exist.
They stretch 26 miles, say, the length of a marathon or 100 Sears Towers, if that's easier for you to visualize.
They encompass more than 500 acres of public land, the same as 20 millennium parks.
And almost a quarter million Chicagoans live within a 10-minute walk of the boulevard.
So that means that Wonder Ways can go big, 26 miles of connected public landscapes,
building climate adaptation into neighborhoods across the city.
But it can also go small, a shaded walk home from school, a hill to sled down when it snows,
the smells of a summer cookout, or the sounds of birdsong outside your window.
Those are the ways that a big idea can become part of someone's life,
and very few pieces of Chicago infrastructure can operate at both scales at once.
That's the magic of the boulevards.
Thank you, Donnie.
You've heard the vision, but how are we going to pay for it?
Well, in a lot of ways, we already are.
Every single year, the city of Chicago reinvests in the boulevards through capital improvements and infrastructure projects.
And every time that a boulevard is ripped up for a repaving, every time a water main is replaced,
every time an adjacent transit station or park is improved, we have an opportunity to put the boulevards back better.
And every single year, environmental and community organizations invest in the boulevards and the neighborhoods surrounding them,
with tree plantings and stormwater infrastructure, stewardship grants, and community activations.
So what's missing isn't investment or enthusiasm.
What's missing is a shared vision and a plan for action.
The boulevards do not fit neatly in a box.
They were designed as parks that kind of look like streets,
but then they're also designed as streets that kind of look like parks.
In over 150 years, responsibility for the boulevards has been divided into patchwork.
Today, at least six Chicago agencies own, construct, program, or maintain parts of the boulevard system,
each independently doing essential work, with no champion to oversee a broader vision.
To unlock their potential, the boulevards need a champion, and they need a coalition.
A champion dedicated to keeping the entire system in view, to advocate for the boulevards,
and align agencies, older people, projects, and funding streams all around a cohesive vision, and a coalition.
that you can see on the screen that includes environmental community organizations that goes
beyond just city government to include these groups that are trusted and ingrained in Chicago's
neighborhoods. And critical to the process are the planners and the landscape architects,
folks like us at MKSK, shameless plug, I know, who bring folks with these different priorities
together to help shape a cohesive and actionable vision plan. After all, Wonderways is not as
a singular design or a singular place. Each boulevard design should reflect the generations
of lived experiences and stories of the people that live there today. Some communities may
prioritize shade, habitat, reduce flooding, and others are just going to want safe and lively
places to gather and play and find wonder right out their front door. So the vision is 2050,
50, but the work can start right now with all of this in the room, and in many ways
the work has already started.
The first step is to activate the boulevards, community events, markets, and art, maybe
even a boulevard marathon if we want to dream really big, to bring people to the boulevards
and showcase their potential.
The second step is to grow the boulevards, to work with environmental and community advocates,
including our friends at the Morton Arboretum, to add tree canopy and green stormwater infrastructure,
to build local stewardship of these spaces before making major investments.
And the third step is to transform the boulevards incrementally, neighborhood by neighborhood,
to design and program with the community, with each capital project building on the last
until we have a resilient and connected climate commons.
Thank you, Donnie.
so let's get started as long as we have your attention we're calling on the mayor we're
calling on the alders and civic leaders to recognize chicago's boulevards once again
as a connected civic system worthy of a dedicated champion we're calling on government agencies and
community environmental leaders to convene a big boulevard coalition that advocates for,
invests in, and works together towards a shared vision. And we're calling on the Chicago communities
and the people of this city, all of you, to rediscover the boulevards as their own,
to reimagine, activate, and care for what they become next, which is long overdue.
one that builds on the Burnham legacy of no small plans and turns a shared vision built with
communities into action. Climate change is upon us. It's unpredictable and unprecedented.
It's so much larger than any one of us. But we're Chicago. We dream big and we adapt,
just as we did 150 years ago and countless times since.
So let's build on what we already have,
and let's fall back in love with the Chicago Boulevards
to make our communities more resilient, more joyful, and more alive.
Thank you very much.
We've got about five minutes for questions if you want to sit down.
Thank you. Thank you, Jim.
Thank you. You guys can come and take a seat up here, too.
We're going to do a quick, if you're okay.
Congratulations again, and thank you for everybody who made all this happen.
Very encouraging how many submissions there were and how many people care about our city.
Now we're going to give you the hardball questions that you didn't know were coming.
No, thank you.
And I think we only have about five minutes.
So unless anyone has a burning question, I do have a microphone back here, but I'll start.
Obviously, at City Club, we love collaboration.
We love working together.
We love working across sectors.
You two are two separate projects, right?
But yet there are some similarities.
and there are some ways that I think you can all work together and bounce off of each other.
Assuming that's the case, how do you imagine working between your two projects
to keep some great things moving forward?
Well, I think that there is so much synergy between our ideas,
as you probably heard in the remarks that we both shared.
And I think one of the most incredible things about both projects
is that it really is about activating and investing in neighborhoods and communities
that perhaps have long been under-invested in.
And we're investing in ways that are sort of, we work at the Morton Arboretum in tree time,
and the type of work that we're proposing and the type of work that, you know,
this boulevard system is proposing is really about long-term investment.
You invest in the green space, you invest in the trees,
And you're really investing not just in current, you know, the current day, but you're investing in future generations.
And I think this activation of neighborhoods and really thinking about Chicago over the long term, hundreds of years,
is really where we can find a lot of partnership and synergy between both of our projects.
Yeah, and what I love about the Morton Arboretum's work is just how rooted in science and research everything that they do is.
you guys have been doing this for decades, generations, and for us as designers, landscape
architects, urban planners, what a joy to be able to collaborate with you all, get to know you all
through this process, but also envision how we could come together, both the scientific side of
things and the designer side of things, to create something really beautiful that just becomes such
an asset for our communities, something indelible that will last the test of time, like you said.
One other shared piece is both of our projects and both of the concepts really showcase that
infrastructure, built infrastructure is not separate, but is actually can really partner
with nature. You can't think of one without thinking of the other if you want to think
long-term. If we invest now in our green infrastructure, trees, plants, nature, that will
actually do significant work to mitigate impacts of flooding, solve stormwater issues, solve for
urban heat islands. So if you think about green from the very beginning, it really is quite
complementary. And I think that's the other thing when you think about boulevard systems and some
of the project ideas that we have long-term or that we've already stewarded and moved forward.
infrastructure and nature are not working against each other they're in partnership
can i can i build on that for a moment because too the thing i love about that and what i would
add too is that infrastructure can be joyous infrastructure can be wondrous and when it's
thought about in that sort of holistic way and is layered it can be you know these can become
system spaces again that really add value to people's lives and make an impact
so these are big plans right you're talking 100 years um but let's talk five years 10 years and
if you're looking back in five 10 years what do you what would you like to see that you can point
to and say that this city is better that was done realistically in these few years
you know i think we kind of touched on it at the end of our presentation it's um we really need to
build a coalition right now there are a lot of agencies departments community groups they're
doing a lot of great work but they're doing it separately and so through this process we've
envisioned people coming together the community the governmental agencies the environmental
organizations coming together with a shared vision to create a framework for the boulevards and so in
five years from now if we have that cohesive vision and we have next steps in place that we
can start to take. And while that's happening, it wouldn't stop the communities from starting
to activate these spaces and use these spaces on a day-to-day basis. Some of them already
are, which is great to see. So ideally, you know, we'd want to see folks, groups, agencies
coalescing and coming together around a shared idea. Want to add to that?
Yeah, I'll just add to that.
I think that's perfect.
And people don't know to ask for things in their community that they don't know they can ask.
ask for. The boulevards are often inconspicuous. They feel like roads. And until someone can look
at them in a different lens and say, actually, that's my community space. Why am I not using it?
Why am I not advocating for it? So my hope in five years is that there's a pathway
for communities to better advocate for themselves to ask for better boulevards, more trees,
more places to be. Now, I think we can look five to 10 years, but I even think starting today,
we can think about we're thinking about a new development project a new building project new
infrastructure projects across the city invite organizations that are focused on green space
trees nature to the table from the very beginning because i think one of the things we really want
to talk about and showcase that it's not about thinking about trees or green spaces at the end
about being pretty it's really about encouraging and engaging conversations from the very beginning
across public and private partnerships that have nature from the beginning
so we can plan for and mitigate issues that may arise later
if we think about nature at the end.
And honestly, even solve for, as we've said earlier,
solve for some of the really critical issues that we're going to be facing
with more extreme weather moving forward.
And then as I think five to ten years forward,
I would love to see just so many more neighborhood coalitions and the voices.
It's about public and private leadership of people within this room,
but actually the really critical work, and I know what we've experienced on the ground,
is that this work does take time, but we need to start activating these community voices now
and putting their ideas at the table.
They really do know best, and they know a lot about what they need in their community.
So I could easily see five to ten years from now communities that aren't having projects brought into them,
but instead are shaping the projects that we're moving forward, and that is absolutely essential for long-term stability.
So it's like I just see everything, honestly, can start today.
It's just a matter of it will be multiplied if we start today and then five, ten years from now.
And honestly, what I'd love to see is that I can't tell the difference between a community's economic, health, safety, well-being by their tree canopy.
I would like to see that.
I don't see the difference.
I used to live in Oak Park just over the border from the Austin neighborhood.
And if you've ever driven through, it was very clear it goes from no tree canopy to really significant tree canopy.
I'd like for people not to be able to see the difference between communities related to their tree canopy.
Very good.
This sounds like a Jeffrey Beyer special in the making.
How do you feel about that, Jeffrey?
Maybe it's a documentary about how it all gets done.
Thank you.
These are big visions.
The city is built on big visions.
You all are creating those visions and did a nice job today of explaining how they can come to reality.
but it's this room who can really make them happen and help get behind you
and all you others who have submitted projects and have these great ideas.
We're a city on the rebound.
We constantly reinvent ourselves,
and this is an exciting time to do that to look at the next 100 years.
So thank you.
It's been an honor to have this at City Club, of course,
in partnership with you, Phil, and your team at World Business Chicago.
there's so much more to discuss
what a season we have
coming upon us
there are a couple of elections
that may or may not be happening soon
there's a lot
of discussion
and some tough discussions
that we do not shy away from at City Club
and we hope that you'll all keep coming back
whether it's here or back at Maggiano's
or elsewhere
keep an eye on your email
we have a really exciting lineup
This was a really great way, and last week also, to kick off.
season that is going to help move this city forward and again thank all of you
for doing your part please come back and join us September 22nd we have Chicago
at the center of local news innovation September 23rd we have Marlene Hopkins
the Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Buildings talking about
the municipal code and some exciting changes there as I mentioned on
On September 30th, we have Mayor Brandon Johnson, which is sold out.
But, of course, make sure you put yourself on the wait list when these do sell out,
because we always find seats at the end.
October 14th is building a stronger, more inclusive Chicago.
And October 20th is the power of social enterprise to reduce recidivism.
These are just sampling.
We're, by the way, going to roll out some programs with some other mayoral candidates
and let you all as a civic community get some very specific one-on-one time with them
to understand their vision for the city and why they think they should be the next mayor of Chicago.
We'll kick that off, of course, with Mayor Johnson, and there's so much more to come.
Thank you, thank you, all of you.
Thanks to World Business.
Thank you, Melissa Harrison-Jara.
It's been a great program.
We look forward to hearing everybody back here very soon.
Have a great rest of your afternoon, folks.