Here you will find articles about  land use, zoning and building regulations, traffic engineering, urban renewal, economic development, parks and green spaces, and cityscapes in Illinois's capital city. 

 

People who don't know it should be aware that "Springfield" is an urban-ish agglomeration of some  120,000 people, of which the City of Springfield is the largest part. Often classed as a medium-sized city for analytic purposes, it is in fact a small city even by U.S. standards. Thus its enduring political tension: Should Springfield stay a small town or turn itself into a proper city? Its many immigrant small-towners from elsewhere Downstate seem to prefer that it stay a small town (albeit one with jobs and better shopping), while its sizable faction of cosmopolites (many of them professionals and public servants  who have emigrated from bigger places) wish it to be more urban. The problem is that Springfield is too big to be a good small town and too small to be a good city, so nobody's happy. 

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I wrote about urban issues in the capital for 40 years. (It was my exasperation about a plan to rebuild Capitol Avenue that enticed me to resume columnizing for Illinois Times after a 15-year hiatus.) Nothing I wrote made any difference, which a visit to the city will confirm.

 

In part because of a lack of a consensus about the ends of growth, development policy has been left by default to the town's developers. Sprawl is apparently unstoppable; the city occupies nearly three times more land than it did four decades ago, having spread out from 21.5 square miles in 1960 to 67.2 square miles in 2020, during a period when population grew by only 37 percent. Springfield may never become the big city that its boosters once dreamed of, or a better one, but it was becoming a wide one. Since then the city has stagnated in every other way.

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