The Public Infrastructure of Work and Play

A city's infrastructure influences the daily life of residents, neighborhoods, and businesses. But uniting the hard infrastructure of roads and bridges with the soft infrastructure of parks and public art creates significant political challenges. Planners at all stages must work at an intersection of public policy, markets, and aesthetics--while also accounting for how a project will work in both the present and the future.

The latest volume in the Urban Agenda series looks at pressing infrastructure issues discussed at the 2017 UIC Urban Forum. Topics include: competing notions of the infrastructure ideal; what previous large infrastructure programs can teach the Trump Administration; how infrastructure influences city design; the architecture of the cities of tomorrow; who benefits from infrastructure improvements; and evaluations of projects like the Chicago Riverwalk and grassroots efforts to reclaim neighborhood parks from gangs.

Contributors: Philip Ashton, Beverly S. Bunch, Bill Burton, Charles Hoch, Sean Lally, and Sanjeev Vidyarthi

Michael A. Pagano is Dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and a professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, faculty fellow of UIC's Great Cities Institute, and editor of Remaking the Urban Social Contract, The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy, Metropolitan Resistance in a Time of Economic Turmoil, and Jobs and the Labor Force of Tomorrow.