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The future of urban water will only become more complex. Rain is an excellent example of a water source that is infrequently considered and more frequently ignored. For the most part, U.S. cities are designed—and paved—to clear rainfall as quickly as possible, without any possibility for long-term rainwater storage or reuse. This approach is at least indirectly responsible for many of the problems associated with urban storm events—flash flooding, for example, as water pools on impermeable surfaces.

But storm water can be a resource, provided we build the spaces and tools to capture it. The recent book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, by Alex Steffen (with a foreword by Al Gore), discusses ways in which cities can reuse or mitigate the effects of storm water. Among these is rainwater harvesting, a passive process that has been around for millennia. Rain simply “runs through downpours into cisterns that store it for use in a variety of applications,” including doing laundry, flushing the toilet, and irrigating grass. The “quality of the water,” the book says, “can be matched by the role that the water will serve.”

The long-term value of this kind of environmental integration should not be overlooked. In April, a U.N. climate panel warned that an altered climate “could diminish North American water supplies and trigger disputes between the United States and Canada over water reserves already stressed by industry and agriculture.” The outlook, even for a comparatively “wet” continent like North America, is dire: our future will include “more frequent droughts, urban flooding and a scramble for water from the Great Lakes, which border both the United States and Canada.” More efficient—and imaginative—uses of local water supplies will help alleviate future droughts and water wars.

I recently spoke to Martin Felsen of UrbanLab, a Chicago-based architecture firm and national winner of this year’s City of the Future Contest, sponsored by the History Channel. For that contest, UrbanLab submitted an ingenious proposal that completely re-designed the infrastructure of Chicago, transforming the city into a kind of living filter—or what might be called a bio-architectural valvescape—creating a highly efficient water
treatment plant at a metropolitan scale.

“We wanted to do something that involved the whole city,” Felsen said in an interview, “so we immediately started thinking: what’s a simple, relatively modest move, whose principles could be easily communicated? And water is basically the reason why Chicago is here. The whole economy here is really based in this water supply.” In particular, the supply is Lake Michigan and the rain that falls on the city. (Amazingly, 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater, and 95 percent of America’s surface freshwater, is contained in the Great Lakes.)

Referred to as “Growing Water,” UrbanLab’s project calls for some intriguing hydro-management techniques. First, switching the Chicago River back to its natural direction of flow (it had been reversed once, by the Army Corps of Engineers, in 1900). It would also create a series of “eco-boulevards”— something of a cross between a Venetian canal and an artificial wetland. They would run west to east, from Chicago’s suburbs to the shores of Lake Michigan. Each eco-boulevard would function as a giant living machine, treating 100 percent of Chicago’s waste- and storm water naturally, using microorganisms, small invertebrates (such as snails), fish, and plants. Water thus treated
would be domestically re-used—before, once again, being recycled—or would simply be returned to the Great Lakes biosystem. All in all, it’s a fascinating and richly imagined project.

In our last issue, TNAC explored water—specifically, the lack of it in cities like Las Vegas. It’s interesting to point out how U.S. hydro-politics connects Las Vegas to Chicago. In a recent Chicago Reader article, Michael Miner discussed the future of political control over freshwater from the Great Lakes. When we reach “the day the west runs out of water,” he asked, will Las Vegas, Phoenix, L.A., and others, come knocking on Chicago’s door, demandingwater? Miner argues that, as long as the Great Lakes exist, southwestern cities will never truly learn to live within the limits of their natural water supply; the Great Lakes are a kind of psychological crutch, an abettor to addiction. Once water in the desert southwest runs out, we may see a “siege” on Chicago, which holds the keys to interstate access to the Great Lakes.

If the day comes when Las Vegas shows up, cups in hand, political lobbyists in tow, demanding several years’ worth of Midwestern water, shouldn’t the region do more than simply say no, and instead point to its own imaginative infrastructure of eco-boulevards? This is one of the most important aspects of UrbanLab’s plan. What at first appears to be a radical—almost sciencefictional— re-imagining of Chicago’s plumbing becomes the practical reorganization of a whole city according to inevitable future realities. As Martin Felsen suggested, this is how Chicago “could become relevant again—when water has a more urgent, global importance, and Chicago has rebuilt itself to deal with this coming problem.”

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!