Global Chicago!

21ST-CENTURY CHICAGO Transformed Windy City has a truly global reach By Richard C. Longworth Published October 17, 2004 Picture the confusion of Rip van Winkle, waking in Chicago's City Hall after a 25-year snooze. The mayor's name is still Richard Daley, and he's a tough Irish politician, given to bluster and malapropisms and a fierce devotion to city and family. The City Council is still largely a civic joke. The Democratic Party still rules politics, and the Republican Party barely exists. Poor Rip could be forgiven for asking: Has anything changed here? The answer is a loud and certain yes. In the quarter-century since Richard J. Daley died, and even in the 15 years since Richard M. Daley became mayor, everything has changed. Chicago, once the smoky, broad-shouldered industrial behemoth and Midwestern capital, has become a global city, competing more with Frankfurt and Shanghai than with Detroit or St. Louis. A new book titled "Global Chicago" celebrates, explains and chronicles this metamorphosis. Published by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the book describes what a global city is--there are only 12 to 15 of them at the top of the worldwide list--and tells why Chicago, with New York and possibly Los Angeles, is an American city that truly belongs. As the book makes clear, globalization has changed everything about the city--its economic life, of course, but also its arts, education, people and even politics. "Global Chicago" is the first book-length attempt to describe this rebirth. Written by leading Chicago academics, practitioners and journalists, it aims to change forever the way Chicagoans look at their town. Some of the changes are well known; others less so. Chicago workers today labor at computer terminals, not blast furnaces. Bistros and three-star restaurants have replaced diners and pizzerias at the center of Chicago cuisine. Neighborhoods long abandoned to street gangs and drug runners are drawing new housing and new residents. The grandchildren of the Chicagoans who fled the city for the suburbs are returning, transforming neighborhoods from the South Loop to Lincoln Square to Woodlawn. The icon of residential architecture is no longer the bungalow, but the loft--or the rehabbed bungalow. A city once famed for grit and gangsters boasts miles of flowering planters and a spectacular new park that is rivaled only by the Tuileries of Paris as a civic magnet, drawing Chicago's mix of nationalities and colors to promenade, laugh and play. Creation of global city All this, as the book explains, is the work of globalization, and the creation of a global city. A global city is as different from industrial cities as the factory towns were from the trading posts that preceded them. In an industrial city, much of what a company did--manufacturing, sales, accounting--took place in one city, often in one building. Now the global economy scatters all those functions and jobs across the world. But this activity has to be coordinated and guided somewhere, and that somewhere is the global city. Such cities have corporate headquarters, of course. But more important, they have the high-powered services that corporations need: law firms, accountants, financial markets, consultants. Theoretically, global citizens can live anywhere, linked by instant modern communications. In fact, they are clustering in great cities--New York and London first, but also Shanghai, Singapore, Frankfurt, Sao Paulo and Chicago--because face-to-face contact is so important. What these global citizens want is information--call it the latest tip, call it gossip--that you can't get on CNBC or Bloomberg. The only place you get it is in global cities, where the action is. And that's where global citizens come to work and, increasingly, to live--in the lofts and townhouses going up south and west of the Loop. They say that people are what they do. Cities, too. The way Chicago earns its living has changed utterly. So it makes sense that almost everything else has also changed. Certainly the people have. Once dominated by Irish, Poles and other European immigrants, Chicago has been invaded and revitalized by waves of Latino, Asian and African immigrants--Mexicans, especially, but also Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Nigerians, Indians, Pakistanis and Iraqis. The city has 130 non-English newspapers. The 911 center can respond to emergency calls in 150 languages. Many new immigrants arrive with education: The city's health system, schools, arts, electronics industry, graduate schools would collapse without them. Twenty-two percent of the city's residents are foreign-born. Some immigrants cluster in tight neighborhoods; others sprawl; half of the area's Mexicans live in the suburbs. Nigerians, Indians and Iraqis hold top jobs at Chicago's universities, hospitals and museums. Scientists from around the world staff the Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab. More than half the graduate students in engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago are foreign-born, and the post-9/11 crackdown on visas has sent shock waves through schools that rely on foreign students for tuition and for the brainpower that keep them vibrant. Links to homelands Earlier immigrants came looking for industrial jobs, settled in, married and spent their lives here. New immigrants are in touch with their homelands daily, through the Internet and phone cards. (One shop on Lawrence Avenue stocks cut-rate cards for immigrants from 200 countries.) The world impacts on Chicago in a million ways. And vice versa: $1.8 billion in remittances go from Chicago to Mexico every year, and Mexican candidates come here to campaign. Chicago's law firms fight cases in courts around the globe. Its doctors fight AIDS on every continent. Its architects design buildings in Angola, China, India and everywhere in between. Its scholars pretty much invented the International Criminal Court. Globalization even has revolutionized Chicago's most time-hardened institution: politics. Chicago politics--the Daleys, the Machine, the deal-making--look the same. But looks deceive. The Machine of Daley I delivered jobs. The Machine of Daley II delivers amenities. And that makes all the difference. Once, people came to Chicago to take jobs that were already here, in the mills or stockyards. City government delivered some of those jobs, from park workers to school bureaucrats. All the jobs, in big factories and big bureaucracies, were in one place and were easy to organize politically. This was the original Machine: jobs for votes. There were plenty of campaign workers, and politics was a mass affair, with lots of rallies and ringing of doorbells. Almost none of this exists anymore. The mills and stockyards are gone. So is most of the patronage system. So is the politics that all this supported. Instead, Chicago has to compete in a global marketplace for companies and people who can live anywhere. If Chicago is to survive in a globalized world, it must attract those people and companies. And so the politics of jobs has become the politics of amenities. The goal of Daley II is to make Chicago more attractive than Denver or Toronto. That's what the flowers down the middle of the street are all about. Ditto with Millennium Park, and Navy Pier, and the revitalized and de-politicized Park District. That's why schools top Daley's agenda: Global citizens will not move to Chicago if they think they will sacrifice their kids to the public schools that the first Mayor Daley bequeathed to the city. The effort is beginning to pay off. Chicago, once "Beirut on the Lake," is getting good ink around the world. The Guardian of London called the city "exhilaratingly beautiful." This month, the International Herald Tribune in Paris said that "there may be no city so expressive of modernity and energy." The elder Daley ran his campaigns on the cheap, with some help from big retailers and the steel and power companies that dominated the city's economy. His son spends big money on television campaigns and gets funding from the lawyers, bankers, stock traders and construction firms that depend on city contracts. Is this all due to globalization? Executive recruitment A lot of it is. Local political guru Don Rose noted that Daley I ruled an empire of $3,000-a-year postmen and steelworkers. Daley II will fail or succeed on his ability to pull in seven-figure global lawyers and consultants and the companies that employ them. Great cities are organic, growing and changing. Those that thrive must constantly reinvent themselves, finding new ways to prosper. So Chicago is not home free. Unless the revival of the schools continues, the influx of middle-class professionals will wither. Chicago's role as a transport hub depends on the growth of O'Hare International Airport. Traffic congestion could throttle the city's charms: Other global cities such as London have installed high-speed trains from airports to city centers. Keeping headquarters is important, but keeping the big firms that service global companies is more important. Six of these services are crucial--accounting, advertising, banking, insurance, law and management consulting. Chicago ranks in the top dozen cities in the world in five of them. The sixth is banking, where Chicago is barely in the top 70, and sinking fast. The global economy is a cutthroat place. Chicago must solve these challenges to stay at the top. Can its school system be reformed thoroughly? Can the new immigrants working at the bottom of the economic ladder find a place in this economy? Can it keep drawing in the people it needs to compete? The answer reached in this book is--so far, yes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ^ what a great article. I think I will go and read that book.>