The Living City By William McDonough 居住的城市(4)

Chicago is supporting the green neighborhood idea with efforts like

Greencorps Chicago, a community gardening program. Over the past several years, Greencorps Chicago crews have worked on nearly 500 sites, planting trees, tending flower gardens and receiving on-the-job training in skills such as landscaping and community outreach. Even in small city parks, the

experience of getting ones hands in the dirt and planting a living thing provides Greencorps members a meaningful connection to the natural world. At the same time, it helps create places everyone can enjoy and welcomes non-human nature back to Chicago.

On a larger scale, the City's efforts to protect and restore the lakefront, the Chicago River, and the city's bigger parks are also crucial. These are key areas of Chicago's commons. They are the city's lungs, its habitat for other

creatures, its vital threads of landscape, the home of the trees and the earth that absorb and filter water while providing pleasure for all.

The commons are also the baseline of the city's health. To preserve and

enhance them we must watch how the water flows. Is storm water absorbed where it falls? Is its passage into the river a slow, percolating flow or a

headlong rush? Does rainfall erode the soil or restore it? What kinds of toxins does water pick up on its way to the river?

Ideally, the city would release water at the same rate it would be released if the landscape were in its native vegetated state, the water flowing slowly to the river, clean and ready for reuse. The flow of water, the most basic element of life, will be the measure of our progress. When we can say with confidence that the Chicago River runs clean, the city will be well on its way to being the greenest in America.

As we tread that path, our work on The Chicago Principles will be guided and enhanced by our collaboration with the City and Chicago's citizens. It is our hope that we will together create strategies that provide everyone in Chicago with good health care, clean energy, safe water, hugely effective business models, and daily opportunities to engage the natural world. These changes will make the city an ever more safe, delightful and productive place. And before long, Chicago just might find a new place in the national imagination with an inspiring, restorative vision for urban America.