Understanding Our Rivers: Transformation in Chicago’s River Corridors

The Our Great Rivers initiative was a catalyst for change in our rivers and riverfronts.

Chicago’s rivers touch more than 25 communities and are vital natural, economic, and social assets. The rivers can – and do – benefit our neighborhoods and the city we call home. Collective action, comprehensive planning, and investment have addressed many longstanding challenges to our rivers. As new challenges emerge, decision-makers must learn from past efforts and seize the opportunity to strengthen the rivers and communities that we visit, enjoy, depend on, and call home. 

Our Great Rivers reshaped the approach to planning on – and around – Chicago’s rivers. Launched in 2016, it was a pivotal time when the riverwalk was expanding, significant water quality improvements had been achieved, and interest in visioning for the river corridor was stronger than ever.

Our Great Rivers established an updated vision for riverfront investments, building from previous plans, that resulted in renewed focus on investing in riverfront projects, collaborations, and other initiatives – including the recommendation to establish the City of Chicago’s River Ecology and Governance Task Force.

This research project, Understanding Our Rivers: Transformation in Chicago’s River Corridors, reveals some of the changes since that time, with the goal of documenting progress and showcasing the potential for innovative investment, collaborative action, and strategic thinking about river corridors for the future.

We are at another exciting time for river corridors in Chicago, and now is the time to reflect on this progress and strategically decide what’s next. Although Chicago has made great strides in advancing the principles of this vision, we still have work today. River improvements are not distributed evenly across the city, with some stretches continuing to face pollution, flooding, erosion, and inadequate access to the recreational and economic benefits the river can provide.

For more than 100 years, the history of Chicago’s 150-plus miles of river and riverfront was of pollution and neglect, but since the Clean Water Act of 1972, the 1979 founding of the Friends of the Chicago River, and the varied investments and programs centered on improving Chicago’s river corridors, the river system is now viewed in a different light. Due to the commitments made to repair the harm the river corridors are now cleaner and more accessible – supporting the resiliency, local economic growth, and physical and mental health of surrounding communities.

The creation of Our Great Rivers was a milestone in thinking about the river comprehensively. Released in 2016 by the City of Chicago, MPC, and other partners, it is a unifying vision to create a river system that is inviting, productive, and living, meeting the needs of residents, communities, businesses, and ecology alike. It was created to spark change in how Chicagoans view the three rivers within the city’s borders: the Chicago, Calumet, and Des Plaines Rivers.

Today, as the river corridors continue to transform, proactive city efforts to strategically – and boldly – plan for investments is urgently needed. It is an ideal moment to update the strategic vision for the river corridor so it can simultaneously protect communities from the effects of climate change, create access to nature for all residents, allow nature in the city to thrive, and support economic growth both on and around the rivers.

MPC developed this evaluation to provide information on how the river system has changed since the Our Great Rivers initiative was launched. The evaluation documents trends in demographics, socio-economic, and community development, to share how the overall river system, as well as community areas along the river, have transformed over the last decade. To be consistent with Our Great Rivers, we grouped the quantitative data into categories to correspond with the themes of inviting, productive, and living. With the help of partners, we combined this data with community stories about their evolving relationships with the river. In doing so, MPC hopes to create a more complete picture of why investment in our rivers and riverfronts is critical for our region, and why our approach must be thoughtful and keep equity in mind, so that all of the more than 25 community areas that the rivers touch benefit from its transformation into the future.

Our Rivers: Inviting, Productive, and Living

This evaluation explores data as part of three themes: Inviting, Productive, and Living. These three themes were developed as part of the Our Great Rivers initiative and were used to provide a way to group the goals and action steps of the vision.

The River Reaches

Our river system is expansive and diverse. Out of approximately 605,500 citywide parcels of land across the city, more than one-in-ten (12%) directly touch the river system. When considering the parcels that touch those parcels (which we call river adjacent parcels), as well as the river parcels, it’s closer to one-third (31%) of all parcels. That’s a lot of land! To understand the general diversity, differences, and similarities between river parcels, river adjacent parcels, and non-river-adjacent parcels, our team generated data that fell into those three categories. To compare the geographies across the city, we broke this project down into a single city-wide data set and six sections of the river system, which we call reaches. The specific reaches we researched and collected stories about are:

• Reach 1: North Branch / North Shore
• Reach 2: North Branch / Goose Island
• Reach 3: Main Branch / Downtown / South Branch
• Reach 4: South Branch / Bubbly Creek
• Reach 5: The Calumet River
• Reach 6: The Des Plaines River