Floating & Drowning and So-called Chicago

🌿 The plaques at Canal Origins Park tell the story of a preordained imperial greatness — “Geography is destiny!” A newly built floating wetland tells us we are now moving “between industrial past and wild futures”. And so the origin story of colonial capital reinvents itself again and again. Let’s talk about a city built to drown. A swamp beneath 20 feet of fill, about dry land born as mortgage-backed securities, about liquidity that flows from cycles of banishment and death. Can we dive through the concrete, glide through layers of fill, and flow against financial liquidities? Between the drowned swamp and the floating wetland, what are other visions of the makings, and unmakings, of so-called Chicago?