Readings and reviews
Regions looks at people and places to consider our life in nature. It pursues the question through five chapters describing the life and work of people across five continents, looking at their uses of land, food and energy in rural and great urban regions. In this pursuit it opens the unique perspective of the regionalist and offers the idea of regionalism as a creative response to the question of how to make our home in nature.
This short book, history of a farm, concerns my cousin Alvin, his family and their farm at Island Grove. Alvin tells me how he managed the farm for 60 years, sharing his constant concerns and a farmer’s enduring perspectives. He describes 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...