Chicago
Illinois, USA
The Urban Collaboratory is working with Chicago stakeholders to explore how different forms of transit can improve access to food, healthcare, and education.
About Chicago
Following New York City and Los Angeles, Chicago, IL is the third largest city in the United States.
Home to 2.7 million people, Chicago is nestled along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan. Chicago is known for being the home of former President Barack Obama, as well as the home of 8 professional sports teams.
The Urban Collaboratory is working with stakeholders in Chicago to explore how different forms of transit can increase access to food, healthcare, and education for Chicago residents.
- Population: 2,716,450 (July 2017 Estimate)
- Area: 227.63 square miles
- Median Household Income: $50,434 (in 2016 dollars)
- Poverty Rate: 21.7%
As of 2017
- 56.2% of workers in Chicago travel to work in a car, truck, or van
- 28.3% travel to work using public transportation
- 6.6% walk to work
- 1.7% bike to work
- On average, it takes a worker in Chicago 34.9 minutes to travel to their place of work.
Related Projects
in Chicago
Principal Investigators in Chicago
Geoffrey Thün MUD, BArch
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor of Architecture
Associate Dean for Creative Practice
Geoffrey Thün is Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan where he teaches design studios, courses in urban systems, site operations and material systems. He is a founding partner in the research-based practice RVTR. He holds an M.UD from the University of Toronto, and a Professional BArch and BES from the University of Waterloo.
Thün’s work ranges in scale from that of the regional territory and the city, to high performance buildings, to full-scale prototype-based work exploring responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere, and social space. These operational scales are tied together through a methodology that entails a complex systems approach; one that assembles around each project a multiplicity of agents, forces and contexts and leverages these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents towards integrated and synthetic design work. His academic research has attracted external funding from the U.S. Department of Energy / National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL), U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Research Council of Canada (NRCan), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) and Ford Motor Company. Geoffrey is also a co-founder of the Urban Collaboratory.
Recent Projects
+ Transforming Shipping Containers into Chronic Care Clinics
Kathy Velikov MA, BArch, AIA
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor
Kathy Velikov is an Architect, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and President of ACADIA. She is founding partner of the research-based practice rvtr, which serves as a platform for exploration and experimentation in the intertwinements between architecture, the environment, technology, and sociopolitics. Her work ranges from material prototypes that explore new possibilities for architectural skins that mediate matter, energy, information, space, and atmosphere between bodies and environments, to the investigation of urban infrastructures and territorial practices, working through the techniques of mapping and analysis, speculative design propositions, installations, and writing. Kathy is a recipient of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Award, the Canadian Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, and co-author of the book Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (2015). Her work and writing has been published in TAD, AD, Footprint, JAE, IJAC, Leonardo, New Geographies, eVolo, Volume, [bracket] Goes Soft, and MONU, as well as in the books Towards a Robotic Architecture, Third Coast Atlas, Infrastructure Space, Hypernatural, Paradigms in Computing, Performative Materials in Architecture, and High Performance Homes. She is co-curator of the traveling exhibition “Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural” and co-editor of an upcoming book on the topic.
Recent Projects
+ Transforming Shipping Containers into Chronic Care Clinics