How not to design a university: UIC's Circle Campus and the Medical District
Yesterday, we went down to Pilsen to check out the Molé de Mayo festival (crowded, hot, fun!) and then drove around a bit to explore this part of the city.
We somehow ended up around the UIC campus. Most of it was built around 1965 on a 100-acre parcel near the Chicago Circle interchange, hence, its name as the 'Circle Campus'.
The history of UIC on their website fails to mention that to build it, the city demolished much of old Greektown and Little Italy. It merged with the older, 1920s medical campus a few blocks away to form a single campus in 1982.
The edges of the campus are the definition of "liminal space." The blocks are very long - about a half mile (!) in length, a ten-minute walk in ideal conditions.
Most of the buildings present blank walls, loading docks, or are otherwise set back from the street. All of these are wide, high-speed roads, which makes it much less inviting for pedestrians.
The sidewalks are decent, and at least there are trees, but there's absolutely no inducement for human beings to be in these places. There's no "there" there.
Similarly, the medical campus, which retains a fragment or two of the old street grid around its nicer 1920s buildings, is mostly a bunch of blank-faced hospital buildings, loading docks and parking lots.
It's only as you go outside of the campus that South Halsted starts to resemble an actual city neighborhood again, with human-scaled urban form - narrowing down to two travel lanes, buildings built to the edge of the sidewalk, storefronts.
There's also an older neighborhood cross-street where all the restaurants and bars are, but the campus itself is just intensely problematic, and the way the medical district is set up, even with its many teaching hospitals, I'm stunned how little there is in walking distance - no shops, housing, groceries - and how forbidding the streetscapes are.
I realize that universities have unique needs in terms of land use, facilities and so on. But this is an exemplar of post-war "suburban campus" design, created in a car-centric mindset. While inside the campus, it might appear to be a parklike setting, in reality it's more like a sprawling outlet mall literally next to a highway.
From a transit perspective, it's served by a few stations on the Blue Line, which are, tragically, all in the center of the Eisenhower expressway, and located at the edge, rather than on campus themselves; and the Polk station on the Pink Line which is centered nearer the Rush Medical campus. There are buses, but none that actually cross through both campus' centers.
Due to how the CTA lines are designed, to get to the campus at around 8am from where I live via the Red Line and Blue Line would take an hour, but half that time if I took a car, and that seems true of most neighborhoods outside the central core.
Could UIC "re-urbanize" itself by imposing smaller blocks, allowing more variety/density on those edges, adding more pedestrian plazas around campus, arguing for more/better transit, and calming traffic?
