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Transforming the Calumet in Chicago
Şevin Yildiz and Phil Enquist brought together students from planning, architecture, landscape architecture and advanced climate systems research to work in tandem to find solutions
Why would Chicago forge a new delta within the Calumet region — the district where industrial ambition has most dramatically reimagined the interplay between landforms and waterways? Chicago sits at the mouth of a conduit — a vast system connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta and Gulf of Mexico through interwoven river networks. The Mississippi, the mother delta of them all, forms a natural web of rich ecosystems. Yet, Chicago’s contribution through the Calumet, Chicago, and Illinois Rivers is remembered primarily for the massive agricultural and industrial pollution these
waterways carry downstream. The Calumet region ofers the potential to reimagine Chicago’s relationship to the larger system through ofthe-grid creative solutions that work locally and regionally. Can ecological science, planning, and urban design work synergistically guide this transformation?
The spring 2025 Master of City Design studio at University of Illinois Chicago was organised around modular frameworks and multi-scalar approaches to generate design and planning strategies for the Calumet region. Through spring studio work and an early summer charrette, studio participants examined
Chicago’s deep structure remains largely hidden beneath the surface of everyday life
Calumet Region reimagined as a series of parks
land use challenges and developed a new roadmap for deltaic transformation and climate adaptation. The resulting sub-regional design proposals and thematic strategies created opportunities for community collaboration, fostering citizen science initiatives, localised climate solutions, and the evolution of naturebased design thinking. Two complementary groups formed the team: graduate students from planning, architecture, and landscape architecture working interdisciplinarily, and post-graduate fellows engaged in advanced climate systems research, whose contributions expanded the project into material engineering and resilience planning.
The Calumet system on Chicago’s South Side, with its socially, racially, and ecologically rich tapestry of communities — both human and non-human — built what William Cronon calls “Nature’s Metropolis” on the foundation of steel plants, stockyards, workers’ houses, and industrial innovation. In doing so, it left behind a completely rebuilt system of land and water. The Illinois-Indiana state boundary was established with little regard for the unique geography shaped by beach ridges along the Grand Calumet and Little Calumet rivers. This disregard for natural systems continued through subsequent watershed development, extensively altering original drainage patterns to serve urban and industrial needs while neglecting the ecological
integrity of the waterways. Lakes were drained, earth was moved, and new strata of slag, ore, coal, household and organic waste replaced the original soil, lake waters, and post-glacial prairies and dunes. Rigid neighbourhood grids cut across the natural contours of land and water, creating a fragmented system that resembles islands in a disconnected archipelago. Heavily burdened by the remnants of polluted industrial plants, the Calumet region sufocates its residents — human and non-human alike — with pollution, while chronic flooding overwhelms the disconnected systems under changing weather patterns, deepening injustices for today’s communities.
A deltaic approach, pursued through this design studio’s work, briefed researchers and designers to reimagine the region’s future through interwoven lenses of climate adaptation, environmental justice for existing communities, and industrial innovation, fostering conditions where emerging novel ecosystems might flourish alongside their human neighbours. The studio’s ambitious charge was to reimagine both factory spaces and the nature of work itself, particularly as the subregion attracts new tech campuses. Deltas serve as vibrant ecosystems of ecological exchange, where diverse species interact and thrive. The end goal is the creation of a system that functions like a delta: moving clean earth, filtering polluted water, and slowing flooding to sustain the health of humans and other species.
The reintroduction of the region's native landscapes was a key restoration principle
The brief further invites the studio team to design new governance structures and multijurisdictional planning frameworks, recognising that climate change and pollution transcend the administrative boundaries humans have drawn across the landscape.
The team’s project name: ‘Of the Grid Calumet,’ emerged from designers recognising a unique characteristic of the Calumet region: beyond O’Hare, it represents one of the rare areas in ‘Chicagoland’ where conventional street grids dissolve. Yet this concept extends far beyond physical infrastructure — it sets a tone for commitment to unconventional, nature-based design strategies that can address the region’s intertwined environmental and social challenges. Lakes anchor the studio’s design vision. A new interconnected park system, woven around Lake Calumet and Wolf Lake, encompasses an added green space that is 2,000 acres beyond
Chicago’s celebrated Michigan lakefront parks. The team mapped existing clusters of open space and investigated how these fragments could be woven together into contiguous parkland. This analysis revealed a network of five parks, each taking its name from the water body that defines it. Presently drained to shallow depths and fragmented by transit infrastructure, the lakes are reimagined as multifunctional landscapes: water retention zones, recreational waterfront, aquatic habitats, and emergent wetlands. In the New Delta proposal, these water bodies will function through adapted cloudburst infrastructure, designed to combat the severe flooding that persistently challenges South Chicago.
The persistent environmental justice advocacy within these communities has inspired our commitment to a future where economic prosperity and environmental health reinforce rather than oppose one another — a future where
Deltas serve as vibrant ecosystems of ecological exchange, where diverse species interact and thrive
Calumet houses the most altered and artificially constructed landforms and hills in Chicago URBAN
communities need not sacrifice their well-being for economic advancement. Housing is woven into this health system, addressing climate and pollution impacts through strengthened energy subsidies, increased street tree canopy, and systematic flood prevention strategies. Community co-benefits are generated through mechanisms such as reparative planning, enhanced public health infrastructure, progressive zoning policies, retrospective pollution penalties, and mandatory brownfield remediation for companies.
As a city built through decades of human interventions and engineered solutions, Chicago’s deep structure remains largely hidden beneath the surface of everyday life. The studio team deeply explored the original geological and hydrological systems that shaped the sub-region. A unifying principle emerged across the group: to regenerate clean soil and water systems by transforming landfills and slag heaps through bioremediation into integrative emerging ecosystems. The Calumet area has been witnessing an unexpected resurgence — novel species are appearing alongside native animals, and plants are returning after a long absence. The project team wove their design proposals around these emerging hybrid systems, facilitating both the cleanup and cultivation of a transformed landscape.
Where soil serves as infrastructure, the Calumet Park system emerges as a living landscape that
reclaims industrial heritage through 2,000 acres of wetlands and woodlands, 1,500 acres of prairie, and 700 acres of remediated hills in a predominantly flat city. Areas flanking internal creeks, mostly former landfills, would be transformed through remediation, creating artificial mounds and retention ponds that channel surface water runof while protecting local communities from flood damage. These new landscape types will restore aspects of the original topography and prairie wetlands through a deliberately planned delta system.
As new green employment opportunities are fostered, a phased long-term reimagination and infrastructural overhaul of the area presents possibilities for testing nature-based solutions in flood control, soil remediation and wind-driven district cooling. A quarter-mile bufer along the Calumet River restores floodplain function and relocates industry away from the water’s edge, creating space for reimagined industrial uses: Biotech Incubators modernising spaces for green production and research, and Circular Economy enterprises transforming waste into local building materials and regenerative products. Innovative solutions like mycelium bricks, bioluminescent flora, and organic building materials demonstrate the ecological commitment to future construction practices. The Calumet’s transformed topography creates the framework for the on-site testing of urban climate systems. For instance, elevated landforms capture and redirect prevailing
Climate adaptation and co-existence with this altered landscape guided the team in their approach
New remediation and rewilding approaches were introduced by research fellows
winds, guiding cooling airflows through neighbourhoods, wetlands, and restored corridors to combat urban heat.
Access and connectivity are the main principles of the project. Increasing communities’ access to clean and green spaces and waterways is the top priority for both physical and mental health. Bridges, connections and trails are envisioned to complete broken links and facilitate co-existence among species. The park network and 130 miles of new trail system bridge spatially fragmented communities like the historic district of Pullman and East Side, weaving together innovative park typologies that become the foundation for inter-community transit through gondolas and shuttle buses. Mending links among landscape fragments cultivates a cohesive Calumet identity, transforming the current perception of isolated assets — Big
Marsh, Wolf Lake, Steel Workers Park — into an interconnected whole.
The spring studio’s vision and phased remediation plan sparked a robust community engagement process. Home to vibrant environmental activism and justice coalitions, a group of Calumet stakeholders engaged with the macro principles through a public exhibition. Calumet has historically drawn non-profits from throughout Chicago working on open land conservation, river restoration, and wilderness enhancement. The studio’s documented output, both book and booklet, contributes to this collaborative movement. A month-long summer charrette brought the Pullman community together to explore the core values and principles underlying the New Delta proposal, with residents actively shaping nature-based solutions, infrastructure priorities, and public health strategies.
The studio instructors Dr. Şevin Yıldız and Phil Enquist (FLA) would like to thank our nine students and three research fellows for their work, our director Dr. April Jackson, and studio TA Symphony Malveux for their semester-long support and Vinayak Bharne for this invitation. One of our studio lecturers Steve Apfelbaum has been instrumental in the intellectual conception of the Delta idea, and we have gratefully benefited from Dr. Mark Bouman’s expertise on the Calumet. We would also like to extend special thanks to CECHE, the UIC Center for Climate and Health Equity, for generously sponsoring both the spring studio and summer charrette and, Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), for hosting our presentation. This collaborative work aims to open paths for interdisciplinary urban health and climate adaptation research. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to all Calumet communities and researchers from whom we met and learned.
Graduate team members
•Aesha Vinit Acharya
•Ashley McKnight
•Aubrey Hills
•Clare Colvin
•Disha Abhay Chande
•George Perkins Anene
•John Lamberton Mack
•Kshitij Sriperambuduru
•Zi Tang
Fellows
•Joshua Fraser
•Dimitri Nesbitt
•Eneyda Salcedo
Rethinking the Calumet as a climate adapted novel urban experiment inspired fellows for deep time engagement
