I had to take a break from Dark Age Ahead to link to this letter to the Chicago Tribune.

Daniel Burnham hangs heavy over the city of Chicago. This is the centennial year of his grand plan for the city - one of the giant leaps ahead for the planning profession in this country - the first comprehensive plan.

After the 2005 Ohio Planning Conference, a few friends and I dutifully toured Burnham’s stamp on Cleveland. You can see the convention center in the background.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

~Daniel Burnham

Some Chicago residents are tired of that sentiment, and in some of the debate about finishing the lakefront parks Burnham once envisioned, Jane Jacobs enters.

Instead of Burnham, how about a little Jane Jacobs? One of the things that makes cities vital, she proved, is variety in various forms.

Variety of age of buildings, variety of uses of urban spaces throughout the day, economic variety woven into neighborhoods. Rogers Park’s street-end beaches should be preserved if for no other reason than to have a variety of ways in which Chicago’s urban spaces connect to the natural world of the Lake. Sure, it would be great if there were no private beaches, but it’s not the end of the world. That land was private before Rogers Park and Edgewater became part of Chicago; it’s history, not economic perfidy, that created these exceptions.

~Bill Savage

It’s not about order; it’s not about grand visions and diagrams. It’s about life. Small plans can make those lives better. Quite literally, get out of plan view. Only birds, airline passengers, aliens, and Google Earth viewers experience cities that way. Get out on the street.