The dirt on Depave Chicago
What is Depave Chicago?
Depave Chicago is an initiative to transform paved land to healthy, life-supportive spaces and to do this by working with communities hand-in hand who envision and desire to enact a better future.
Depave Chicago emerges from years of research and critical analysis about the impacts of pavement on communities and natural systems—impacts that are both visible and invisible in our air, soil, water, and human bodies.
Depave Chicago participates and is learning from a growing movement across the North America led by Depave Portland to bring awareness to the legacy problems of our overlay paved city and to create tools of collaboration to transform paved sites through landscape design.
As an organization, Depave Chicago hopes to create a sustaining coalition of individuals, organizations, and institutions to work together to address pavement in the city, site by site and across the region.
While thinking about the whole system, Depave Chicago works directly with and for communities to meet the needs of that community in place. This means undertaking projects that speak to the unique needs of each site, and over time, to build the physical and social tools needed to scale projects and capacity with more communities over time.