The Living City By William McDonough 居住的城市

By William McDonough & Michael Braungart

? 2002

Over the past several years, Mayor Richard M. Daley has been putting forth a vision for the future of Chicago that would have made the city's old ward

bosses blanch. In a town once best known for the railroad and the stockyard, the smokestack and the Board of Trade, the mayor is saying that he wants to make Chicago the "greenest city in America."

Whether the Chicago of your imagination was shaped by Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, or the blues; by bustling LaSalle Street, busy O'Hare or pastoral

Wrigley Field, Chicago has not been widely known as a green city. But Mayor Daley does not believe that history is destiny. Since taking office in 1989 he has been working to restore Chicago's environment with programs that turn the conventional notion of the big, industrial city on its head. Now Chicago sits on the edge of a new frontier, ambitious and energetic as ever. As Department of the Environment Commissioner Marcia Jimenez said: "We might even become the greenest city in the world."

The mayor got started by inviting trees back into town. Sowing saplings block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, Daley's administration has now planted more than 300,000 trees throughout Chicago. Other long-term projects are devoted to restoring Chicago's 29-mile Lake Michigan shoreline and creating a 3,000-acre wetland preserve within the city limits. An industrial restoration program, meanwhile, is cleaning up hundreds of acres of land contaminated by heavy industry, making the City's brownfield redevelopment effort the largest in the United States.

With each of these programs contributing to a resurgence of health and

natural beauty, Chicago could probably begin to wear the "green city" mantle without doing much more. But Mayor Daley understands that a 21st century metropolis must go beyond beautification and make environmental initiatives an integral part of a long-term strategy for growing economic and social

health. To that end, says DOE First Deputy Commissioner, David Reynolds, the City is working "to bring industry back to Chicago while also revitalizing local ecology." The mayor is committed, he says, to "making the city a national model of how industry and ecology can exist side-by-side."

Sounds great. And Chicago's not just talking the talk. Mayor Daley's "greenest

city in America" idea has recently been reinforced by the City's announcement that it had signed an agreement to buy 20 percent of its electricity-for schools, libraries, subways and streetlights-from renewable sources of power by 2006. That's the largest purchase of renewable power in the United States. And because the power must come from within the state of Illinois, it is spurring the local development of renewable energy technology. Indeed, some

renewable energy companies, such as the solar panel manufacturer Spire, have moved their headquarters to the Chicago Center for Green Technology, a newly renovated, environmentally intelligent facility built on a restored

industrial site. Spire is already supplying Chicago with locally manufactured solar panels, which the City has installed on a number of buildings, including the Field Museum, the Mexican Fine Arts Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

This is not your father's Windy City.

A Green Constitution

If Chicago's streets are lined with trees, it's power increasingly renewable, and its industries and institutions tapping into the benefits of green technology, has the city not already arrived as a national environmental leader? Well, yes. But to insure that its environmental initiatives last, the City has realized that it needs a set of enduring principles to guide decision-making over the long haul. The greening of Chicago can only be sustained, City officials believe, if each strategic choice makes ecological, social and economic sense, not just during the Daley administration but well into the future.

David Reynolds put it this way:

"We have been saying that we are going to be the greenest city in America. But to truly become a thriving green city we need to carefully define what that means and what we should be striving for, day-by-day and year-by-year. No city in the United States has really gotten this right yet, and we believe that part of the problem has been that no American city has developed a set of guiding "green" principles-akin to the timeless principles of the

Constitution-that describes its ideals, sets its course and defines its means. That's what we are doing in Chicago. And we hope the principles we develop become so well known and so well understood that they define how we operate as a city government for the next one hundred years."

As Chicago's environmental initiatives picked up steam behind the mayor's "greenest city" rallying cry, Daley and former DOE Commissioner, Bill Abolt (now in the City's Budget Director), hired William McDonough + Partners to help draft its new principles. Working closely with the DOE and other

government agencies, our community design team is crafting a set of design guidelines-The Chicago Principles-that will serve as a reference point for the City as it develops a holistic, integrated plan for the greening of Chicago. Like the Constitution, the Chicago Principles will be based on timeless values. In essence, they will extend the rights and responsibilities of a democratic government and its citizens into the realm of nature and design. For example, in 1992 when my colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, and I developed design principles for the City of Hannover, Germany, for the 2000 World's Fair, we crafted nine declarations with the City that reflected its

commitment to sustainability. The Hannover Principles included declarations such as:

Insist on the rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.

? Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognize even distant effects. ? Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.

? Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use. ?

If these principles seem serious and demanding, well, they are. The language is meant to suggest the rigor required to live up to them. At the same time, we have found that striving to recognize interdependence or rely on natural energy flows in everything we do-from designing buildings to community

plans-turns out to be inspiring and extraordinarily satisfying as well as a lot of fun.

And it yields a very unconventional perspective on urban design. Most

responses to today's environmental woes aim to limit the impact of human activity by minimizing pollution and waste. We'd rather eliminate waste altogether and create delightful, healthful places designed to ultimately generate more energy than they consume, like the solar and geo-thermal powered facility we are building at Oberlin College. There, students and

teachers not only reap the benefits of clean renewable energy, they also enjoy copious daylight, fresh air and a landscape alive with trees and flowing water. The building even teaches how nature works. One can see the workings of wetlands, for example, by observing how a series of botanical gardens filter the building's wastewater. Indoors and out, the building and its grounds

celebrate both human creativity and the abundance of the natural world. In Chicago our goals are the same. With the City, we will be drafting principles that encourage planners, developers, engineers and architects to pursue