20 June 11 | Images Publishing

Toward Zero Carbon: The Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan

A book published by Images Publishing by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

Toward Zero Carbon: The Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan is a book about Chicago. It’s about the future of our home city as the greenest in America and a world leader in energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions. In the book’s pages, AS+GG offers a comprehensive vision of how Chicago can become much more sustainable, in part by upgrading and in some cases repurposing existing buildings, and how we can significantly limit the city’s contribution to the causes of climate change. We also envision a series of innovations in urban design in which a new picture of downtown Chicago emerges. In it, families live, work, send their children to school, go to the grocery store and stroll landscaped promenades within a dense urban core, all without needing a car. The quality of life is high, carbon footprints are low. If Chicago is the city that works, this future Chicago is the city that works even better.

But this book is potentially about other cities, too. Properly adapted to local conditions, the Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan could form a foundation for custom-designed plans for Atlanta or Los Angeles, Rome or Rotterdam, Bangkok or Beijing. That’s because cities everywhere are facing many of the same problems confronting Chicago. The highest percentage of commercial structures dates from the mid-20th century, an era in which energy was relatively cheap and there was limited concern about wasting it. Traffic congestion and air pollution are nearly universal urban problems; some of the largest metropolises are approaching a state of perpetual gridlock. In most of these cities, the percentage of residential buildings in the urban core remains remarkably low, even as older, obsolete office buildings, which could be converted to apartments and condominiums, sit largely empty. At the same time, families avoid living downtown because of the lack of amenities—particularly schools and green space—necessary for raising children. And so the pattern of long, stressful commutes in machines powered by fossil fuels continues, dumping untold metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. But it’s a pattern that can be broken, which is what Toward Zero Carbon is about.

As we continue to develop the DeCarbonization Plan for Chicago, then we also look to apply its lessons elsewhere. As the saying goes, think locally, act globally. We plan to.

To purchase Toward Zero Carbon: The Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan, see the listing HERE on Images Publishing’s website.