A while back, I mentioned that I went to the Daley Urban Forum at UIC. The final panel of speakers included Sarah Dunn from UrbanLab. She spoke about a design project that she was working on called Growing Water.
In her presentation, she said that 20% of the Earth’s fresh water is in the great lakes. 95% of the United States’ water is located there. Less than 1% of the 1 billion gallons of water Chicagoans consume PER DAY is returned to the lakes. There is a subcontinental divide that creates 2 watersheds, splitting Illinois in half. Water flows from the middle of the state toward Lake Michigan. We have come up with interesting engineering feats to get around this watershed, including reversing the Chicago river and the Deep Tunnel project.
This project proposes that over the next 100 years, Chicago take up a massive effort to recycle water by using the watershed to funnel waste water through green pathways back toward the lake. The idea is to build a living system of eco-boulevards, adding on to the boulevards and parkway system that Chicago already has in the limited Emerald Necklace. These boulevards would be spaced every half mile or mile throughout the entire city, and would treat rain water and waste water via microorganisms, plants, and small invertebrates.
I don’t quite see how they expect to keep the eco-boulevards clean at this point. I think the largest issue we would have with this system is people dumping extremely toxic wastes into them. I love the idea though, and I love that there are people out there thinking of things like this. We’re reaching a point where clean fresh water is going to become a scarce resource, and Lake Michigan will continue to be one of Chicago’s greatest natural resources.
I wonder if UrbanLab is hiring?