by Maria-Romina Hench
First-year students taking Steven Carrelli’s Green Design: Bicycle Chicago course and juniors in J. Harry Wray’s Politics of Biking course experience the city with a different kind of consciousness. As they ride around the Chicago area, they contemplate and discuss issues related to transportation, politics, city planning, community-building and sustainability.
Carrelli has been teaching his class, part of the Discover Chicago program, for two years. The students take most of their rides during Immersion Week, and their site visits connect to their studies during the quarter. “We get to ride to scenic places and also go to the industrial corridor,” says Carrelli. “They see how the city runs in ways you might not know or think about.”
The first-year students explore urban sustainability from a variety of vantage points. One focus is urban transportation–ways people get around, how streets are designed, and public transportation.
“I’m not an urban planner. I’m a painter,” says Carrelli, an instructor in the Department of Art, Media and Design. He has commuted by bicycle since he moved to Chicago 20 years ago and has long been interested in the issues the class explores. “I’ve thought a lot about the way we get around the city. A lot of this is part of my consciousness.” Though it’s not the main art he makes, Carrelli has made art that’s environmentally themed and deals with issues of human impact on the environment and has supported artists and arts organizations that address these issues through visual art.
He and his class ride to government and nonprofit organizations engaged in making the city and its transportation system more sustainable and bike-friendly. For example, they visited the Chicago Department of Transportation to learn about the city’s Bike 2015 Plan, which aims to encourage bicycle use for trips that are less than 5 miles, and they visited the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which developed the I-GO car-sharing program. Students also hear from artists and activists who seek to raise public awareness about the impact of human activity on the environment.
In addition, students visit for-profit businesses like PortionPac Chemical Corp., which manufactures cleaning products on the West Side, and Uncommon Ground, a Rogers Park restaurant with a rooftop organic garden, and talk with them about what the businesses are doing to decrease their impact on the environment and how that works out financially.
Carrelli says his students are most surprised to learn that dense urban areas are really the greenest parts of the country in terms of impact on the global environment. “Density allows for urban transit; it allows walking and biking to be viable means to go to work and to the store,” he says. “Our tendency to spread out is precisely the thing that has driven our increasing appetite for energy of all kinds, and certainly fossil fuels. Moving to places we think of as being green has made us less green, and students are usually startled by that.”
On the first day of Wray’s junior-level class, the students bike Chicago’s Lakefront Trail, about 38 miles roundtrip. They enjoy the ride, take in the sights and get to know their classmates. The group takes a break halfway through, and Wray, a professor of political science, asks how this ride connects to politics. “They’re usually not prepared to think about that,” he says. He then tells the students about how the trail and the lakefront–accessible to all–are the result of political struggle. “More than 100 years ago, people wanted to turn it over to private developers and there was resistance,” he says. “Political struggle, in other words, may have kept Chicago from becoming Miami Beach north.” This conversation sets the tone for the class and encourages students to think about course themes during their rides.
Wray’s class started as a Discover course in 2002, and three years ago it became part of the Junior-Year Experiential Learning program. They ride at least 30 miles weekly, and the longest trip is a century (100 miles) to Kenosha, Wis., and back. Most of his students are not avid bicyclists, and they are often empowered and surprised by how much they can do on a bike, says Wray, author of “Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life.”
One of Wray’s favorite rides is through the very diverse neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. “Most of them have never been there, or if they have, they were in a car. To be on a bicycle has an effect on one’s consciousness. That’s another thing that’s political: You experience the South Side or anything in a very different way when you’re on a bicycle than when you’re behind the wheel of an automobile, and this shapes the way you think about the world.”
The students also ride through the Forest Preserve to the Chicago Botanic Gardens and connect to the environment in a different way than walking or jogging the trail. “Biking is an ongoing act of non-destructive living, and there aren’t many of those around,” says Wray, a member of the university’s Sustainability Initiatives Task Force.
Students in both classes consider transportation systems in other cities and countries, and Carrelli and Wray use Amsterdam, considered one of the world’s most bike-friendly cities, as one example. Wray, who’s studied Amsterdam’s transportation system, says that 40 percent of all trips are taken by bicycle, 40 percent are taken by mass transit and 20 percent by automobile.
“We talk about the car as a tool rather than a possession. A car is one part of transportation rather than the key ingredient,” Carrelli says, adding that perhaps 40 to 50 percent of trips taken by car in Chicago are less than 5 miles. “In a city, making those short trips human-powered can reduce carbon emissions by a huge amount.”
“Students become more aware of the fact that the way in which we design a transportation system really matters,” says Wray, who is a bicycle commuter. “There is a place for the car, but that place ought to be smaller. We ought to be open to a variety of modes of transportation and make it safer for people to walk, make it safer for people to bike, have ample mass transportation and then have a role for automobiles.”