This short book, a family farm history, is about my cousin Alvin, his family and their farm at Island Grove. They have farmed this land for four generations. Alvin, now retired, farmed for 60 years. He’ll be the last of the family to work the farm. He tells me how his father, grandfather, and great grandfather worked the land and built up the farm across many seasons.
Planning Chicago, by Jon DeVries and Brad Hunt, calls for a return to big ideas in a city once famous for bold planning. The authors decry the lack of vision and failure to implement that has beset Chicago planning for decades.
I am coauthor with Joe Schwieterman of Beyond Burnham, An Illustrated History of Planning for the Chicago Region (Lake Forest College Press, 2009). I began writing the book in late 2004 while on a US State Dept. fellowship in Sâo Paulo, Brazil. It was there, during fall '04 (spring in Brazil) that I finally found leisure to begin the book after years of work at NIPC. I was filled with frustration from five years of toil on a regional plan that still was unfinished. In Sâo Paulo, I was far enough away from it to reflect, to gather some...