Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment

Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy

by Harold L. Platt

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.

342 pages, Hardcover

Published March 9, 2018

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, but it really wasn't what I was expecting based on the title. It's less about climate change and climate science than it is about corrupt Chicago machine politics. I was shocked (but not surprised) to read about how many chances the city had to do the right thing for both the environment and the people and instead prioritized big business and political kickbacks.