Sinking Chicago : Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment Hardback
by Harold L Platt
Part of the Urban Life, Landscape and Policy series
Hardback
Description
In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period.
During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality.
Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage.
Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland.
They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River.
The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management.
Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region's waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system.
Environmentalists contested policymakers' heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment.
Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:342 pages, 7 figs., 13 maps
- Publisher:Temple University Press,U.S.
- Publication Date:09/03/2018
- Category:
- ISBN:9781439915486
Other Formats
- Paperback / softback from £25.25
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:342 pages, 7 figs., 13 maps
- Publisher:Temple University Press,U.S.
- Publication Date:09/03/2018
- Category:
- ISBN:9781439915486
