EP 2: Cabrini-Green Dreams and Nightmares

Explicit content warning

01/14/16 • 49 min

Depending on who's telling the tale, the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago's Near North Side are either patient-zero for urban dysfunction and decay, or a humble high-rise utopia, Corbusier's Radiant City with soul. But at the end of the day it was home to 15,000 people. Cabrini-Green was mostly demolished by 2011, but its legacy both haunts, or enriches, the city, depending on who you ask. Co-hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman asked two Chicagoans: Chicago filmmaker Ronit Bezalel, whose film "70 Acres in Chicago" spent 20 years tracing the decline of of this community; and artist, designer, and educator Andres Hernandez, whose exhibit "Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)Generation" at the Glass Curtain Gallery explored how the ghosts of Cabrini-Green still settle over our pop-culture landscape. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.

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EP 1: Chicago Plays Itself

From the 80s to the 90s, movies set and filmed in Chicago showed a city cleaving itself in half. From John Hughes suburban-kid-in-the-city hijinks to the near apocalyptic urban horror of Candyman and Child's Play, these 20 years of film reflected the straining inequalities of the city that produced them. Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman and Chicago architectural journalist Zach Mortice recount Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines as sociopath cops and that time Kentucky hillbillies took on the Chicago Outfit. With special guest Bill Hogan (dude was in Home Alone).

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EP 3: Immodest Proposals for Chicago's Lakefront

Chicago's most valuable natural asset is its lakefront, forever free, public, and protected by law. This lakefront is so valuable, argues the architects at Port Urbanism, that we need more of it to pay off the city's massive debts. Or (if you ask the designers at UrbanLab) newly built islands in the lake must be drafted into relieving pressure from an overstressed storm drain system by filtering and cleaning the city's water. Featured at the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Port Urbanism and UrbanLab's lakefront proposals offer infrastructural fixes to some of Chicago's most dire emergencies. They also colonize a near-sacred urban vista with varying degrees of public and private space; not the type of thing you can do without getting through some pretty contentious community town hall meetings. Hosted by Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman, with guests Andrew Moddrell of Port Urbanism and Martin Felsen of UrbanLab. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.