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Chicago and American Urbanism
University Of Chicago Press
November 2010
On Sale: November 15, 2010
254 pages
ISBN: 0226042936
EAN: 9780226042930
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Our traditional image of Chicago—as a gritty metropolis
carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of
machine politics overshadows its ends—is such a powerful
shaper of the city’s identity that many of its closest
observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over
the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our
more commonly held ideas about the Windy City—inherited from
such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel
Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko—with the
goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now:
the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago
the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors:
the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose
historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great
Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of
the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features
a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population
mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing
number of middle-class professionals working in new economy
sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the
top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments
and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium
Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress
spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously
innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood
revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city
governance for the twenty-first century. The Third
City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago
under Daley’s charge is to understand what metropolitan life
across North America may well look like in the coming decades.
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