Chicago Studies: Urban October Lecture

New for 2021, this annual signature event features a distinguished scholar-practitioner addressing a topic of existential importance for our city and region. Our 2021 lecture will introduce the theme of climate change and the ways in which it threatens, but also offers opportunities to, “the city of big shoulders.” Presented by Professor Harold L. Platt (History and Urban Studies, Loyola University Chicago) and based on his 2018 book, Sinking Chicago chronicles Chicago’s 150+ year struggle to combat the impacts of climatic shifts through strategies as varied as the reversal of the river and the raising of the grade of its streets, and through crises from the Great Fire (aggravated by a heat wave and prolonged dry spell) to the extreme weather events and flooding of the mid-20th Century and the heat wave of the mid-1990’s.  Ultimately, Dr. Platt will draw lessons from the past for Chicago’s future, as we prepare for still more extreme weather aggravated by global climate change.