Design Prin­ci­pal and Founder Car­ol Ross Bar­ney joins lead­ers in shar­ing a ​“per­fect vision” for Chicago’s con­tin­ued evolution.

“Near­ly three mil­lion peo­ple lived in Chica­go in 1920. In less than sev­en­ty years it had grown from a vil­lage of under 30,000 to the world’s fifth largest city. This explo­sive growth result­ed from abun­dant resources, expan­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties and unbri­dled inge­nu­ity unleashed to cre­ate a liv­able city. Today, one-hun­dred years lat­er, Chica­go still has those qual­i­ties — and the poten­tial to be one of the world’s most pro­gres­sive and desir­able cities.

But we have work to do.

Future Chica­go needs to be denser, tighter and efficient.

Cities attract smart peo­ple who want to work with oth­er smart peo­ple. World-chang­ing ideas hap­pen when we work and live togeth­er. Plan­ning tra­di­tion­al­ly at a con­stant and uni­form­ly low den­si­ty worked in the last cen­tu­ry, but in a city tran­si­tion­ing from mak­ing things to think­ing things, a dif­fer­ent approach to cap­ture col­lec­tive ener­gy is needed.