CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Chicago’s Central Manufacturing District on the city’s southwest side is characterized by the toxic Bubbly Creek and vacant industrial sites. It’s an area city officials would like to revitalize.
Five teams of University of Illinois students spent this semester studying the area and coming up with potential improvements. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture and urban and regional planning.
“It’s great to have all three groups together because each one brings its point of view and expertise, and we can solve the problem in a much wider fashion,” said architecture professor Kevin Hinders, one of three faculty members overseeing the project.
The students will show their proposals in an open house from 1-5 p.m. Dec. 15 at Stantec, Suite 1400, 224 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.
The U. of I. students’ work in Chicago is part of a larger trend in higher education, said landscape architecture professor Conor O’Shea.
“A lot of universities are trying to increase their presence in cities,” he said.
In addition to an interdisciplinary experience, O’Shea, Hinders and urban and regional planning professor Rob Olshansky wanted to provide opportunities for their students to work on urban design problems in Chicago.
“This is really important for trying to recruit students. We want to be able to say we have all the advantages of studying (on the Urbana campus), and in addition to that, we have access to work in the big city,” Olshansky said.
The architecture students are part of a Chicago Studio program that Hinders coordinates, through which they spend a semester in the city. The landscape architecture and planning students are on the Urbana campus and traveled to Chicago several times during the semester to visit the site, work face-to-face with their colleagues, meet with professionals and city officials, and give presentations on their work.
The Central Manufacturing District site is bordered by 35th Street and Pershing Road, and Ashland and Racine avenues. The students have included the adjacent Bridgeport and McKinley Park neighborhoods in their project. They worked closely with the city’s planning staff to select the site and the issues they would consider, and received input from them during project reviews. They also worked in parallel with students from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s department of urban planning and policy, which was doing its own project in the area.
The South Fork of the Chicago River – also known as Bubbly Creek – flows through the area. Bubbly Creek is full of heavy metals from manufacturing, as well as trapped methane from the days when carcasses from the nearby stockyards were thrown into the creek. When heavy rains overwhelm the capacity of the sewer treatment system, raw sewage flows from Bubbly Creek into the Chicago River. Much of the focus of the students’ projects involved looking at how to remediate those problems.
Landscape architecture student Erika Johannesen described the project as a puzzle of looking at opportunities for the area and figuring out how to make them work. Her group’s project proposes using an anaerobic food digester that turns biomass – polluted silt from Bubbly Creek and food waste from area manufacturers – into energy.
“We’re trying to redefine waste. We don’t want it seen as something that is carted away and taken to a landfill when it can be used on the site itself to produce energy, to produce heat,” Johannesen said.
One of the challenges for the students was learning how other disciplines approached a problem.
“This project demands the students think very, very differently about their role. They are part of a much larger team. They’re going to have to work with a bunch of different people in order to get a project built,” Hinders said. “This is a good exercise in training students to work with other people in order to solve something for the greater good.”
The presence and input of city officials – Chicago Commissioner of Planning and Development David Reifman, Assistant Commissioner Eleanor Gorski and Ward 11 Alderman Patrick Thompson – at the students’ presentations provided lessons in the politics and economics of the area and grounded the projects in reality, O’Shea said.
“The projects are not radical, utopian visions. These projects will be practical reference points for the students when they are talking to potential employers,” O’Shea said.
Architecture student Andree Sahakian appreciated tackling a real-world problem.
“I didn’t expect all the political players. Their insight was really great. Getting to know how they think really helps in figuring out how you pitch an idea,” Sahakian said.
“It was probably the coolest experience I’ve had in school.”