3 ACRES ON THE LAKE: DuSable Park Proposal Project
OBJECTIVES
DuSable Park provides a rich set of particularities--geographical, historical, political, and ecological--to stimulate creative design solutions. These attributes suggest the potential for a comprehensive and resonant concept that goes beyond a generic green space-plus-monument.
While the development of neighborhood parks is best determined by the local communities who will use them, lakefront land in Chicago plays a different role. It is symbolic property, a potential destination for residents throughout the city as well as for visitors. Proximity to the lakefront has historically been a privilege based on wealth. Chicago remains a divided city, predominantly white on the Northside, African American on the Southside, and Latino on the Westside. Unequal access to the lake for African American and Latino communities has been an ongoing discussion. The protection of public land from commercial development east of Lake Shore Drive suggests at least symbolic access for anyone to take advantage of.
What needs could be served by such symbolic public property in an ethnically and economically diverse city like Chicago? Some might say places to raise chickens. Wild spots intentionally unmown and inaccessible. Plots of manicured green to look down on from the perspective of hi-rise living. Low-income housing. Homeless shelters. A year-round urban farm, providing jobs. What ideas might the existence of this land inspire while still in its neglected, undeveloped state?
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This project aims to stimulate innovative approaches to conceptualizing public land and the urban landscape among design professionals and lay citizens alike; to encourage public engagement with urban planning questions; and to create and disseminate a document representing competing perceptions about what needs public land should fill, articulated through creative strategies designed to explore those needs in relation to a specific site.
The project encourages conflict and difference, as central principles of the democratic process, over resolution and compromise, thereby hoping to invite radically innovative and inspiring proposals that are not hampered by the need for city approval. Combining contributions from professionals and non-professionals will create a productive variety of approaches, mixing awareness of critical issues in the field with awareness of critical needs that are often not voiced in planning decisions.
Since this project calls for speculative proposals to stimulate radical thinking and to express unmet needs of urban living, participants may decide to consider or to ignore any or all of the existing contingencies of the site.
Proposals might address issues as broad-ranging as: wildness, ecological diversity, landscape restoration, and/or sustainability; the need for public gathering places not based on consumption; outdoor educational opportunities linked with public schools; community gardens; creative solutions to unmet needs of economically struggling urban residents, like housing, food, and employment; alternative energy production; a site for temporary public art; and/or comprehensive approaches to articulating history through commemorative sites. This is by no means a comprehensive list. The only restraint is to maintain the dedication to, and name of, DuSable.
Who decides how public land is used? In the context of rapid commercial development in urban centers and the concomitant housing crisis for middle and low income residents; in the context of disappearing open lands and increasing corporate control over the remaining "public" spaces; in the context of the flattening of cultural specificity and individual eccentricity in urban landscapes by the homogenizing forces of chain-store capital -- what private or particularized needs might an undeveloped parcel of public lakefront land be imagined to fulfill? What possibilities for imagining the urban landscape are repressed by standard assumptions about "what the public wants," and requirements about best use for the largest numbers? "3 Acres on the Lake" creates conditions of possibility through which to invite particularity, and to explore the benefits of comparing competing and controversial perspectives.
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