Wanted: The next Millennium Park. Or maybe, tomorrow’s version of the Lakeshore East development. Anything big, bold and transformational.
The city’s influential economic development organization, World Business Chicago, said the time has come for this town’s next really big thing, and on Thursday, the group announced a design competition in hopes of finding it.
Called “Horizon Lines: Visions for Chicago 2025,” World Business Chicago said the effort is an open invite to “architects, designers, neighborhood groups, artists, innovators and interdisciplinary teams” to submit visionary ideas that “explore what Chicago could look like in 2050.”
“A winning idea will certainly be something that we feel has impact for the city [and is] bold and ambitious,” World Business Chicago President and CEO Phil Clement said. “And this could come in many forms. The examples that we all know are things like the Riverwalk or Millennium Park.”
The organization said the submissions don’t have to be construction-ready projects but ones that can “inform future planning, policy and investment decisions across the region.”
Like all of the organization’s work, Horizon Lines is a City Hall-blessed endeavor. Mayor Brandon Johnson sits on the organization’s board and Kenya Merritt, deputy mayor and Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events interim commissioner, and Ciere Boatright, Department of Planning and Development commissioner, are among the contest’s judges.
Efforts like these — led by business-types and city officials — have yielded results in the past, setting the stage for what later became Lakeshore East, Millennium Park, the now-revived Navy Pier and more.
For instance, the Commercial Club of Chicago bankrolled the creation of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, a 50-year document that gave the city Wacker Drive, parks along the lakefront while pushing for museums and other cultural institutions.
Another document, the Chicago Central Area Committee’s Chicago 21 Plan, released in 1973, foresaw the development of Dearborn Park in the South Loop.
But the problem with many of these plans, particularly those created in the late 20th century, is that they were too often downtown-centric in both authorship and aim, which frustrated those who lived in the resource-starved South and West sides.
Clement said Horizon Lines is seeking submissions from every neighborhood and is looking through the “important lens of equity.”
Chicago Central Area Committee Executive Director Mark Hopkins said his organization plans to submit an idea the group has already been working on: a bid to cap the city’s expressways with parks.
“How do we build a park over the Dan Ryan, over the Eisenhower, over the Kennedy, or other solutions around the Stevenson, where [the expressways have] chopped up parts of Chicago?” Hopkins said. “Reconnect communities that were bifurcated by the construction and then drive economic development [afterward].”
World Business Chicago said it’s accepting submissions through April 15. The winning submission carries a $5,000 honorarium. The five projects that garner honorable mentions will get $1,000 a piece.