Click here to be redirected to the APA Mobile Site optimized for mobile devices.
 | ||
Join APA in Chicago and Washington, D.C., for this after-work lecture series. Practicing planners, researchers, and professionals from allied fields discuss innovative ideas or present their latest projects. The events are free and open to APA members and nonmembers. If you can't join us in person, check out the podcast. Podcasts of most programs are posted on the event archive page approximately one week after the live event. Tuesdays at APA–ChicagoPlanning Chicago: Reviving a Place for Planning in the CityTuesday, May 21, 2013 • 5:30 p.m. CT Despite a storied planning history, Chicago is no longer a city that plans with confidence and vision. Chicago lacks a city department with the name "planning" in its title. Instead, this essential municipal function is now largely focused on immediate zoning matters with long range and strategic planning in a secondary role and largely replaced with piecemeal, ad hoc, and volunteer planning efforts – often funded and focused on disconnected Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts.
CM | 1.0 RSVP for May 21 Tuesdays at APA Learn More Tuesdays at APA–DCThe Mutating Big BoxTuesday, May 21, 2013 • 5:30 p.m. ET Quietly, stealthily, there has been an ongoing "flattening" of the American metropolis, as many suburbs are becoming more similar to their central cities, and cities more similar to their suburbs. One such sub/urban condition is the mutating big box. In 1962, retailers Wal-Mart, Target, and K-mart all opened their first large discount stores in response to the rapidly growing suburban market. Thus emerged the big box, the retail type perhaps most associated with suburbia because its form both resulted from and embodied the commodity culture often associated with mid-20th century American settlement. As demographics evolve and markets change in today's flattening metropolis, the big box is moving into denser environments — and as a result, its basic form is mutating into new versions that reflect the increasing hybridization of suburban formats with urban constraints.
CM | 1.0 RSVP for May 21 Tuesdays at APA Learn More | My APA
ID or E-mail
Password Remember My ID JOIN APABecome a member and connect with thousands of people who share your dedication to building vibrant communities. Join | |
The city had great success in the 1950s and 1960s in crafting strong central area plans and path-breaking comprehensive plans that laid the groundwork for a major commercial and residential 
revival. In the most recent decade however major planning initiatives have been largely unimplemented and replaced by deal-making, site-specific and one-off projects. Systematic, coordinated, long-range efforts have been difficult to initiate or sustain. Drawing on their new APA Planners Press book Planning Chicago, authors Jon B. DeVries, AICP, and D. Bradford Hunt of Roosevelt University will explain the rise and retreat of planning over the past half century and the need for a planning renaissance in Chicago. 
This presentation by Judith K. De Jong, architect, urbanist, and assistant professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will trace the emergence of key versions of the sub/urban big box, both in the inner city and in urbanizing suburbs, and will project possible urban and architectural opportunities of this shift. 
