Chicago: America's # 1 city?

This is going to be a most pervase & ironic way at looking at Chicago's national greatness, but I do believe it has merit: Most (if not all) of you read Blair Kaman's "High Anxiety" article on Chicago's evolving super high skyline in the Sunday Trib. The article's conclusion included this quotation: "There is a difference between a vital city and a healthy city. In a healthy city, traffic is not perpetually snarled, tall towers inspire awe rather than fear, and there is not a Darwinian struggle for access to light and views. Chicago's reach for the sky is heading in the right direction, but it must be refined if the cityscape is to reach its highest, humanistic poetntial - truly healthy rather than merely vital." That paragraph fascinates me. It brings up something that I truly believe: that the goose that lays the golden egg can be killed. In our most alpha of alpha cities, New York, I believe that that is a distinct possiblity. The pressure on Manhattan (and adjoining) real estate is so great and the city is so predicated on commercial expansion that it is subject to massive and inhumanly scaled development in a way that Chicago is not. The world places such a premium on Manhattan real estate and the city's own commercial orientation tends to value economics over aestetics. And while LA is not NY, I believe that LA, too, is subject to less control of its environment, less positive political pressure, and has more of a development-for-the-sake-of-development than Chicago. It also has an almost fatal desire to see its population grow to enhance its reputation. We live in a century when the unbelievable upturn in urban population will escalate at rates unheard of in the 20th century. The very urbanization that we view today as a positive will be reconsidered in increasingly oppressive urban envirnoments. Chicago, of our three largest cities, is IMHO, best geared to stay above the fray just because it does have the ability to keep it off the overerly active NY and LA radar screens. Sure, we're big and major, but not so big and major that we lose control of our environment. Look at California today: which projects the more positive urban setting: huge, sprawling, growing Los Angeles, or compact, environmentally interested, beautifully scaled San Francisco? My bias is definitely showing. New York and LA seem hell bent on being the size and complexity of Calcutta, something to which Chicago does not aspire. In the long run, using Kaman's terms, no matter how "vital" NY and LA will be, Chicago will be a lot more "healthy" (and still incredibly "vital"). In Chicago, we mind the store more than they do in NY and LA, and we have fewer outside pressures on what that store will look like. Chicago in the 21st century is in a poisition to offer up what no US city will be able to offer: the ultimate, complete urban setting with the high quality of life that you'd like to see with it.>