Burnham’s Vision 100 Years Later

by Mark J. Bouman

When Emily Harris visited Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska two years ago and mentioned where she was from, her new acquaintance said, “Oh! Chicago! I just finished reading [Erik Larson’s] The Devil in the White City —or, at least, I read the Burnham chapters and skipped the H.H. Holmes chapters.” Harris says that in her experience, people elsewhere know Burnham at least from Larson’s book, and for the “make no little plans” quote (even if Burnham probably didn’t utter those exact words).

Harris should know something about this. She is the executive director of the Burnham Plan Centennial, a wide-ranging, “bigger than we ever thought it would be,” region-wide celebration of the completion of a signal event in the history of urban planning and of Chicago. And while Burnham and his colleague Edward Bennett’s plan is certainly an iconic element in the construction of the familiar contemporary Chicago landscape (worthy of study in its own right), Centennial leaders like Harris are keen to see this as a moment that “gets people out of their silos” and talking together about the future of the Chicago region.

There is an evident hunger to do that. More than 250 partners, including public agencies, community organizations, professional associations, and cultural or educational institutions, have signed on to produce a calendar-cramming array of exhibits, events, tours, lectures, seminars and projects. Partner meetings draw more than 200 people, eager to share their work and their vision. And 600 Chicago Public School teachers have been trained in new third and eighth grade standards-based materials that “put Chicago back in the curriculum.”

For those like Joann Podkul and the Calumet Stewardship Initiative (CSI), who engage other area residents in environmental stewardship and cultural activities, and didn’t need the Centennial to get together, it offers the “occasion to reflect a little more deeply than we might otherwise have done on the group’s work” and to strengthen the web of interactions. “I wouldn’t have it otherwise; the more intensive it is, the healthier it is.” It’s healthy indeed that 10 of the 36 organizations at the CSI meeting have committed to an event for the Centennial.

Events appear on the Centennial’s website, which lays out the possibilities for a year of active and reflective engagement in the life of the region with a variety of involvement, venues, and media. One could take in Archimedia Workshop’s documentary film on Burnham and the plan; view exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago, Newberry Library, Chicago Architecture Foundation; take a neighborhood tour with CSI members; walk through Millennium Park pavilions designed by noted architects Zaha Hadid and Ben van Berkel; paddle across Lake Michigan with the Northwest Indiana Paddling Association; or enjoy the outdoors in one of 21 “Green Legacy” open-space projects.

This bustle about a city plan and its planners resonates in a region of nine million souls, in a nation where more than half the residents live in a metropolitan area of more than a million people, on a planet whose six and three-quarter billion people are now evenly divided between rural and urban. If this world seems to be hurtling toward the concerned citizen at breakneck pace, driving people further from nature and from each other, it is well to be aware that the 75-year-old Chicago that confronted Burnham was “provisional and rough-edged,” as Carl Smith writes in The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Two million people lived in the place that a decade earlier an English journalist had called “the most beautiful and the most squalid, girdled with a twofold zone of parks and slums; where the keen air from the lake and prairie is ever in the nostrils, and the stench of foul smoke is never out of the throat. Where in all the world can words be found for this miracle of paradox and incongruity?”

Indeed, as Jerry Adelmann, executive director of Openlands reflects, aspects of the Plan and the planning process that led to it are itself “riddled with contradictions.” Burnham, the “arch-urbanist,” setting aside enormous swathes of forested open space and lakefront; Burnham, the lone heroic planner in actuality working with a committed and civic-minded committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago as well as his partner Bennett; Burnham and the Committee, a mere handful of white men, setting the spatial course for a region of great environmental and social diversity.

Burnham’s solution to the problems of Chicago was to imagine a “Paris by the Lake,” as architectural historian Joan Draper put it. It would aspire, through the sheer beauty and grandeur of its urban forms, to impose order on environmental chaos and unite the disparate elements of the city’s life into a grand civic consensus. Burnham became the standard bearer of the “City Beautiful” movement that inaugurated the modern era of city planning.

As relentlessly and self-consciously urbane as this plan was, the natural world played an important part both in Burnham’s thinking and in the outcome of the plan. Smith says the “key to Burnham’s whole view of nature” may be found in his adherence to the Swedenborgian religion, in which nature is seen as a benign and ameliorative life force for the modern city dweller.

The Plan comes closest to this in its passages about the lakefront. “These views of a broad expanse are helpful alike to mind and body. They beget calm thoughts and feelings, and afford escape from the petty things of life. Mere breadth of view, however, is not all. The Lake is living water, ever in motion, and ever changing in color and in the form of its waves…In its every aspect it is a living thing, delighting man’s eye and refreshing his spirit. Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated by individuals to the exclusion of the people.”

In a practical sense, the “natural” is integrated into the Plan as an architectural element. Historian Robin Bachin writes in Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 that “rather than drawing a sharp distinction between nature and culture, [Burnham and Bennett] envisioned the two working together. The proper placement of trees and flower beds, rather than just their natural beauty, was the key to creating the modern City Beautiful.”

What was truly new about the Plan was that “proper placement” involved both the specific location and style of planting beds and street furniture at the local scale, and it also entailed a regional vision of open space. The Plan places an extremely formal “heart of Chicago” in the context of a regional network of open spaces whose design is left to nature to determine. In this sense, the Plan was the Chicago region’s first “green infrastructure vision.” Those working on Chicago Wilderness’ Green Infrastructure Vision today are equally sensitive to the need to work at “regional, community, neighborhood, and site” levels. The Chicago Wilderness alliance’s Green Infrastructure Vision is a framework for thinking about how we can live in and among natural areas so that we have healthy ecosystems that contribute to a vibrant economy and quality of life for all of the region’s residents.

Daniel Burnham died shortly after the Plan’s release in 1912. But through the work of Bennett, of an activist Chicago Plan Commission, and of an electorate willing to fund the implementation of new projects, many of its specific recommendations came to pass (86 separate Plan-related bond issues were passed between 1912 and 1931). A generation of Chicago schoolchildren came to know of the Plan through Wacker’s Manual of the Plan of Chicago, which became a required part of the eighth grade civics curriculum. Kids played in Plan-inspired parks, splashed along the Plan-protected lakefront, reveled in the sheer coolness of Plan legacies like lower Wacker Drive, the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Lake Shore Drive, Northerly Island, and the central Post Office.

Some of those children and grandchildren might themselves now be planners for agencies descended of Burnham-era entities. Adelmann points out that Openlands stems from the Progressive era Welfare Council of Greater Chicago and from the notion that nature education and exercise fit hand-in-glove with the social welfare and social justice goals of the organization.

Chicago Metropolis 2020, another more recent product of the Commercial Club of Chicago, agreed to form the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee. Groups like Chicago Wilderness have continued to adopt the regional scale, the visionary sweep, and the sense of effort implicit in the Plan. With a chuckle, Dennis Dreher, an engineer and urban planner working on the Green Infrastructure Vision implementation effort, says that “as we perceived the magnitude of the challenge of this effort, the words ‘make no small plans’ made sense.”

Of course, planning has changed in the past 100 years. For Adelmann, the openness and outreach orientation of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s current Go To 2040 planning process is a “glaring difference” from the elite-directed Plan. How “nature” figures in planning has also changed. Bachin writes that the Plan “equated nature with the civic realm and sought to make the landscape of the city reflect this division between civic and commercial space.” In contrast, Dreher observes only about a fifth of the land proposed as area to be protected in the Green Infrastructure Vision is publicly-held land.

As a result, planners will need to work with private landowners either to steer development away from sensitive lands or to mitigate the impact of development through conservation design techniques, which promote sustainable development. For Adelmann, techniques like these, which build on fundamental tenets of current environmental thinking such as restoration ecology, stewardship and sustainability, were simply not in the Plan.

But it comes with being in the planning vanguard that new ground is constantly being broken. Adelmann proudly insists that the Chicago region’s leadership in regional planning has evolved with the times. The area includes the nation’s first National Lakeshore; the first Rails-to-Trails conversion; the first Heritage Corridor; the first federally-designated national tallgrass prairie; the first comprehensive metropolitan greenways and trails plan; the first metropolitan waterways plan; and first biodiversity recovery plan.

Openlands is coordinating the Burnham Plan Centennial’s effort to leave a “green legacy.” These are projects that both “represent Burnham’s vision,” according to Adelmann, and are ones “where a major milestone could be achieved in 2009.”

The projects fall into three groups: the lakefront; open space reserves of regional significance; and trails and greenways. Lakefront projects include the restoration of the Openlands Lakeshore Preserve at Fort Sheridan and the completion of a plan for the “Last Four Miles” of Chicago’s Lakefront. The major open space reserve initiative enhances the visitor experience at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie through trail development and planning for a visitor’s center.

Though our future is far from written, it is comforting to know that such visionary planners fill the role that Daniel Burnham defined 100 year before.

Flash forward 100 years

by Mark J. Bouman

Stop me when you spot the well-known planner at the center of this familiar scene.

In a classically-inspired building overlooking an impressive lakefront park, 36 public-minded citizens – surrounded by maps and charts — are hard at work making plans. These are no little plans; they are soul-stirring “big plans.” By these plans, they hope, a region will be transformed. Urging the group forward with vigor and excitement and a glint in the eye is an unmistakable figure.

STOP. Daniel Burnham, right?

No, today’s leader, on March, 16, 2009, is Joann Podkul, chair, and with her husband Kevin Murphy, shepherd of the Calumet Stewardship Initiative (CSI). It’s not Burnham’s office in the Railway Exchange Building; it’s the field house at Calumet Park. Today’s jam-packed agenda – suffused with the Chicago Wilderness alliance’s concerns to envision green infrastructure, leave no child inside, restore the health of nature, and slow climate change — includes reports from CSI’s education, stewardship, and membership teams.

“Environmental internships are available for high school kids in the Cook County Forest Preserves through Friends of the Forest Preserves. Please pass the word. Tree planting is planned as part of the effort to nurture Hegewisch Marsh back to health. Let Jerry Attere of Chicago’s Department of Environment know if you’re interested. People in Southeast Chicago are starting to hear about the Chicago Climate Action Plan. Is the message getting through in this community where folks have much else on their plate and where English is often the second language?

“The Second Annual 10th Ward Green Summit is in the final stages of planning – this one will be even better than last year. While meeting today, feel free to get up and walk over to the Southeast Historical Museum, which historian Rod Sellers has opened up for the day. More scientists are needed to sign on for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore/National Geographic Society Bioblitz. John Hayes of the Dunes Learning Center has some ideas.”

Podkul urges all assembled for names of people who are not in the room, but who should be. All 36 rise at once and move to posters where contact info may be written under 22 categories such as “social services,” “business,” “education” and “food groups.” This process yields 273 names.

I am swept up in the action – and yes, in the interests of full disclosure and because this was a richly moving gathering, I am happy to say I participated in this meeting. The pace quickens; the noise level rises. Recalling Burnham’s magic words — “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” —the exuberance reaches out of the room, through the park, and into the region beyond. The Daniel Burnham legacy has indeed been carried far beyond the Chicago region.