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.
Where is Depave Chicago?
Depaving places like underutilized parking lots, school playgrounds, abandoned vacant land, as well as streets is key to this process.
Parking lots and paved areas exist in all shapes and sizes throughout the Chicago region. Large paved areas are concentrated around waterways, industrial, and commercial sites, while smaller paved areas exist in school grounds and church parking lots. All of these are important sites for depaving.
Depave Chicago envisions our cities transformed—creating green where there’s gray—everywhere children play, people breathe, families and friends gather, tree roots nourish soil, rainwater touches earth, and where animals, insects, and birds flourish.
Why is Depave Chicago?
Over the last century pavement has come to dominate cities so much that we’ve become numb to its presence.
Concentrations and high percentages of pavement pollute waterways through converging stormwater run-off…
…create eddies of residential flooding…
...and intensify the urban heat island effect.
Furthermore, concentrations of pavement means less ground surface for gardens, parks, urban forests, and other public natural spaces that are critical for absorbing, shading, buffering, and provisioning.
In Chicago, 35% of Chicago’s urban land is paved, and 92% of pavement is asphalt.
Some parts of the city including community areas are constituted by even higher percentages of pavement. For example, the community of McKinley Park, where MAT Asphalt operates one of its asphalt production plants, is 46% paved. East Garfield Park is 41%. South Lawndale encompassing Little Village is at 43%. Brighton Park has 46%. These percentages are staggering and speak to a city and communities in peril as we face climate change and increasing heat.
Embracing depaving is a critical step forward to achieving the City’s climate adaptation plan, tree canopy targets, green and complete streets policies, green stormwater infrastructure with volume control targets, and equitable public space.