Decision-making Chicago-style

This case study highlights the interaction between institutions and individuals in the complex process of urban decision-making and reveals the methods of the "city that works". As a governmental institution, represented by a powerful but constrained Mayor Daley, Chicago is shown as a projector of its own needs and goals in exerting its power and influence in relation to such institutions as the University of Illinois and the state legislature. Economist George Rosen analyzes the 1961 decision to relocate the University of Illinois Chicago campus from a temporary to a permanent site. Examining the decision-making process from economic, social and political aspects, he weaves a fascinating historical narrative which reflects the demands and desires of participants from many levels of society and with strong conflicting points of view. Rosen traces the respective roles played in the process by the university, city and public, as well as the state legislature and the courts. He documents the university's recognition of the imperative for growth and change from its inception through its implementation in a new campus. He traces the interaction between the university's goals and those of the Mayor and the city, and how both the Mayor and the university achieve those goals, and to what degree. From another vantage point, however, he shows how one neighborhood's efforts to solve its urban-renewal problems democratically made it vulnerable, how it reacted adversely to its selection as the site, and how its opposition predictably succumbed to the potent Daley political power. Finally he shows what that decision meant to the neighborhood, the university, and the city. Relying on personal interviews and correspondence with the participants themselves for the bulk of his research, Rosen has also gathered relevant information-reports, maps, photographs, statistics, and journalistic commentaries-from individual, university, city, and national sources. His cogent examination will be valuable to those interested in the history of Chicago and the University of Illinois, as well as in how Mayor Daley worked. In addition, he tests various generalizations concerning the process of decision-making, which should be of interest to both policy-makers and scholars.