The city beautiful, the city sustainable, the city profitable: what changed in Chicago’s planning priorities after a century?

This essay explores continuity and change in the planning of Chicago between the early 1900s and the early 2000s. We chose Chicago because of the important role it has played in the development of the US planning profession. Specifically, the essay compares and contrasts the principal priorities reflected in Chicago’s first comprehensive regional plan from 1909 and its comprehensive regional plan from a century later. We used content analysis with both manual coding and AI. To select the coding categories, we relied on a conceptual framework published in a recent theory/history article, which posited that one way to understand the main priorities of the US planning profession is to organize them along five axes: economy, equity, environment (these are often termed the 3 Es), public health/wellness, and the aesthetic aspects of urbanism. We found notable changes in most of the priorities we test, but strong signs of continuity in treating the economy as a top goal. In both plans, economic priorities unambiguously dominate all others.