Chicago in the Climate Change Era: Spatial Strategies for Adaptation and Ecological Co-Existence

The climate crisis in Chicago's metropolitan region underscores the necessity of integrating climate science with spatial planning. The talk examines the interface of environmental resilience and urban development, challenging the status quo to encourage innovation and dismantle the silos separating climate science from spatial strategies. Chicago's 'placetypes'—the complex urban layers that reveal the city's vulnerabilities—are at the forefront of this exploration. The talk advocates for an interdisciplinary approach to spatial adaptation, bringing together community stakeholders, urban planners, and climate scientists in a cohesive dialogue. Highlighting recent projects and strategies, the presentation introduces toolkits for navigating Chicago's environmental nuances, charting a course toward a city-region prepared to meet the climate challenges ahead.

Bio
Şevin Yıldız is an Urban Planning and Policy Department Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She researches ecological planning and urban design in the context of climate change and global urbanization. She recently completed a manuscript that investigates the planning field's changing conceptualizations of wetlands, mangroves, and salt plains in metropolitan regions. Her primary case study is the New Jersey Meadowlands in the New York metropolitan area. Her publications explore how ecological design and planning ideas conceptualize and negotiate values and coexistence norms in metropolitan areas that have expanded into their fringe ecosystems. Her latest comparative piece examines the long-range planning of these land-to-water transitory ecosystems in Mumbai, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and New York. She has led the UIC's Master of City Design (MCD) semester-long Great Cities Studio,' which focuses on conceiving innovative design strategies and systems planning for Chicago's future urban form in the face of changing climate, working on adaptability and infrastructure retrofitting. This studio prepared a New Nature plan for Chicago's Calumet Region at the dawn of climate adaptation in 2023 (APA-IL et al. in 2023) and a Cloudburst Plan for downtown Chicago in 2022. She also serves on the Chicago Department of Planning's River Ecology Task Force since 2020.