Sinking Chicago : climate change and the remaking of a flood-prone environment / Harold L. Platt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Platt, Harold L., author.

Series:

Urban life, landscape, and policy.

Urban Life, Landscape and Policy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Climatic changes--Illinois--Chicago.

Climatic changes.

Floodplains--Illinois--Chicago.

Floodplains.

Flood control--Illinois--Chicago.

Flood control.

Water quality--Illinois--Chicago.

Water quality.

Chicago (Ill.)--Environmental conditions.

Chicago (Ill.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

2018.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ; Rome, [Italy] ; Tokyo, [Japan] : Temple University Press, 2018.

Summary:

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region's waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers' heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

Contents:

The dry years

Introduction : cities, sprawl, and climate change

The triumph of metropolitanism, 1885-1910

The defeat of conservationism, 1910-1920

The rise and fall of the American dream, 1920-1945

The wet years

The boom of suburban growth, 1945-1965

The bust of urban decline, 1965-1985

The rebirth of urban nature, 1985-2011

Conclusion : cities, adaptation, and prairie wetlands.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781439915509

1439915504

OCLC:

1019836521