Last fall, I wrote an academic paper entitled Planning Chicago: A Century of Lessons. The paper touched on many planning subjects and initiatives, including mass transit, green technology, and rail freight improvements. The following excerpt deals specifically with the 2016 Olympia Bid and its dangers:
Currently, the city of Chicago is using a bid for the 2016 Olympics to jump-start many planning initiatives, hoping that the potential prestige of the games will convince state and federal politicians to fund mass transit and infrastructure improvements. MarySue Barrett, president of the nonprofit Metropolitan Planning Council, states, “The Olympics force you to be forward-looking in thinking. People need to think about it not as a one-time event but as a preparation for the next wave of residential and commercial investment and corporate relocation and expansion” (Krohe, July 2007, p. 50). Advocates of the Olympic bid are hoping that the games will be the “Big Plan” that will unite state residents, business leaders, and politicians of both political parties behind the Chicago region’s needed infrastructure improvements…
Our current reliance on using the 2016 Olympic bid to create results is a gamble that might backfire if another city succeeds in landing the Olympics. The city of Chicago is hoping that their attempt to become the host city for the 2016 summer Olympic Games will influence the state and national legislators to fund needed transportation improvements for the Chicago region… The concern is that a negative response to Chicago’s bid might have a cascading negative effect on…needed initiatives. Since the Olympic bid is being put forward as the impetus for these programs, will a Chicago failure in the Olympic pursuit lead to a lack of support for the infrastructure improvements?
As a region, Chicago must unite behind planning initiatives on their own merit in order to ensure their adoption and completion. Their benefits far outweigh the short-term gains of a successful Olympics bid, and they are too important to ignore if the Olympic bid is unsuccessful. All sectors of society stand to gain from planning improvements, and most lose if we fail. Eventually, problems must be solved, and the cost of doing so in the future is much greater, and the benefit much smaller, than if the problems are tackled now. We must not only make “no little plans,” we must act on the plans that we make.
The entire paper can be viewed as a pdf here.
