“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” – Daniel Burnham, Author of “The Plan for Chicago”, 1909

For over a century, the city of Chicago has lived by these immortal words by Daniel Burnham. This is the city that responded to a massively destructive fire with the world’s first skyscraper. For much of the 20th century, however, Chicago hasn’t much discerned between the scale of its vision and the scale of urban development. As landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted once pointed out, “Chicago has a weakness for ‘big things’…”.

Today, however, Chicago has committed to recreating the urban environment at the human scale. I had the pleasure of visiting my old stomping grounds in Chicago recently and was pleased to see the progress the city has made in its public spaces and bicycle infrastructure. The changes may be…