Conscious Choice: No Small Dreams Allowed

April 2004

No Small Dreams Allowed

Architectural visionaries give us a peek at a futuristic green Chicago

by Manda Gillespie

Bamboo fields? Fleets of electric taxis? Moveable farmsteads? Is this a dream? No, this is the future as painted at the Brave New World premiere. At this event, local designers and visionaries showed us what Chicago might look like in 10 years. Foresight Design Inc., a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting sustainable industry, showcased the design competition entries.

A design competition is a way of imagining a better future and in this case, a greener future. Foresight Design challenged Chicago to “select and define an issue that exists within the city limits, research it and devise an innovative, more sustainable future.”

Eleven teams with members from local universities, and design firms responded. But it wasn’t enough for the teams to just let their imaginations soar — they were required to work with a nonprofit to keep the ideas anchored to today’s conditions and needs.

Peter Nicholson, director of Foresight Design, emphasizes the importance of having fun and getting new people to work together to accomplish goals in this area. He explains that, “It’s not enough to have a good idea. It will die if it’s not communicated effectively and that’s one of the challenges of sustainability.” To this end, he had the entrants use both words and pictures to communicate their visions for Chicago’s future and unveiled the ideas at an upbeat after-work event with food, drinks and music. Something in the formula must be working because some 230 people came out to share in this greener future on a gray February evening.

So who are some of these visionaries? Team Spaceship Earth was one of the most popular participants, winning both the “people’s choice” and the “best researched” categories. Their idea: to take the city’s polluted urban lots (a.k.a. brownfields) and turn them into bamboo farms. But don’t be fooled by its apparent simplicity. Spaceship Earth says at least two types of bamboo would grow successfully in Chicago’s harsh winter climate. What’s more, according to the team — all students at the University of Illinois at Chicago — the draping, lusty green bamboo plants can also sequester pollutants in the soil, leaving a site safer and cleaner. The members of team Spaceship brought the resources of their different backgrounds — urban planning, law and business — to create a plan that was rich in opportunity.

According to their research, bamboo offers more than just beauty to vacant lots. Dan Butt, a group leader, had studied brownfields as an urban planning student. “The city is littered with brownfields and nobody is buying them.” He had also experienced the beauty of bamboo flooring and furniture firsthand. “It’s a beautiful, durable alternative to hardwood floors and I wondered why it wasn’t more popular.” This, he found out, is largely due to the expense associated with bringing the bamboo from China. Research by team Spaceship showed that the 261 acres of brownfield sites in Chicago could be planted with bamboo to provide materials for 11.3 million square feet of housing every 5 years, providing huge job growth potential as well. According to Butt, the demand for this material is growing all across the U.S.

Farming Like Never Before

Another favorite entry was the mobile city farmstead. What’s not to love? Made of reclaimed materials that are assembled, disassembled and then reassembled somewhere in town, this mobile farmhouse would make it possible to lace Chicago’s inner city with acres of gardens. The team, composed of professional designers from DeStefano + Partners, worked closely with Chicago’s nonprofit Resource Center (already doing urban farming) to come up with a design that would create a use for the city’s 90,000 vacant lots. Their ultimate vision, according to team member Matthew Kuhl, is for every ward to have a farmstead surrounded by a couple of acres of gardens. These gardens can provide every neighborhood with fresh, organic vegetables while the vacant lots await development for housing. Later, the farmstead can be disassembled, put on a truck, and put back together and back to work on a different lot.

Hey Cabbie!

The winner of the best design calls for a fleet of urban taxis that makes use of hybrid electric vehicle technology. The designers call it Transcab. This idea is appealing not just for its significant potential to help remediate the global warming and smog associated with cars today — it has the additional appeal of being highly visible. After all, not just environmentalists take cabs. “This makes them the perfect advertisement for a technology that has such tremendous potential to reduce pollution,” explains Dawn Hancock, the owner of Firebelly Design, the “driving” force behind the group that came up with Transcab. Hancock quips that all Chicago needs in order to take the lead on the hybrid electric taxi is a person with the vision...and the money. “We can help them with the marketing,” she laughs.

Why sustainability? It was clear that among the entrants, the idea of sustainability was what got them excited. The winners got perks like massages and $500 to donate to their collaborating nonprofit partner. But as Firebelly’s Hancock said, “We decided to participate because it was a good opportunity to showcase what we already do.” And what most of the participants do is care about sustainability. Many other Chicagoans also care, as evidenced by the many people who turned up on a snowy, winter night to view the show.

People choose sustainability for different reasons. Some begin to care about the environment because a family member ends up sick from pollutants or other hazardous exposures. Many young people snub conspicuous consumption because they have seen the excesses of the previous generation and rebel against them. Some parents with kids get excited about envisioning a future that will be healthier and more equitable than the present. Others feel they have a religious or spiritual responsibility to be stewards of the Earth.

David Reynolds says he fits in the latter category. He is the first deputy commissioner in the Chicago Department of the Environment and was one of the judges for the design competition. Unlike the contests the city holds, the Foresight Design competition doesn’t guarantee the winner implementation. But Reynolds believes design competitions like Foresight’s are important as they allow opportunities for designers to generate ideas that will keep Chicago moving toward being the greenest city in the world. Reynolds reminds us that in a city like Chicago, “the most important part of sustainability is continuing to improve the urban way of life and that in a larger sense, this is helping to care for creation.”

Is the future here? Many of the ideas entered into the design competition are actively being pursued, according to Foresight Design’s Nicholson. Underway are plans to include environmental education in school education and to integrate wind turbines into the building materials of a structure. The team with the design for the mobile city farmstead is currently seeking volunteers to help with its prototype and are hoping to have a model built in time for this year’s growing season.

The competition was a reminder that people don’t need to wait for the government, corporations or a neighbor to make life better. “We are all designers,” Nicholson says, and “we can all be part of realizing a better future. The more opportunities that people have to envision a better future, the closer we come to realizing change.”

Have your own ideas for creating a better, more sustainable Chicago? Foresight Design will be holding another competition at the end of this year and anyone is welcome to participate. To find out more about the Foresight Design competition or this year’s entries, visit www.foresightdesign.org.

Manda Gillespie is a Chicago-based writer who looks forward to taking in the beauty of undulating bamboo fields while wheeling around in a hybrid electric cab.

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