The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago

by Gerald D. Suttles

With its extraordinary uniform street grid, its magnificent lake-side park, and innovative architecture and public sculpture, Chicago is one of the most planned cities of the modern era. Yet over the past few decades Chicago has come to epitomize some of the worst evils of urban widespread graft and corruption, political stalemates, troubled race relations, and economic decline. Broad-shouldered boosterism can no longer disguise the city's failure to keep pace with others, its failure to attract new "sunrise" industries and world-class events. For Chicago, as for other rust-belt cities, new ways of planning and managing the urban environment are now much more than civic beautification; they are the means to survival.

Gerald D. Suttles here offers an irreverent, highly critical guide to both the realities and myths of land-use planning and development in Chicago from 1976 through 1987.

326 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 1990

Reviews

[Zak Yudhishthu · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were three good chapters that were actually about the “land use confidence game“ in Chicago. I thought that these sections did a decent job demonstrating the complexity, cause corruption, and parochial battles involved in development in Chicago. And it’s easy to draw parallels from what he describes in the 80s to the state of Chicago development today. Parts of the book of here, outdated, especially when talking about urban decline and treating yuppies as some strange far away population (when they have become so widespread in Chicago now). But in that sense, the book is simply a product of its time, which actually makes it interesting to read a few decades later.

But when I came to the last two chapters, I felt like I was reading a completely different book. I was genuinely befuddled why they were entire chapters on political corruption in Chicago, with nothing specific to development, or literary perceptions of the city. And in retrospect, even the first chapter or two was pretty muddled in terms of giving direction to the book. Overall, I would only recommend the middle three chapters of this book, and that’s only if you are very interested in this specific issue.