Chicagood is an online magazine launched by The Chi-Town Project. It is a magazine for social conscious Chicagoans that focuses on social awareness issues and those who step up to make Chicago a better place for tomorrow. We also like to have fun and celebrate what it means to be Chicagoan and what is good in our city. Be Chicagood.

    We love saying that we live in the greatest city in the world. The beautiful skylines, innovative monuments and strong-willed spirits that dwell within the city gives us more reason to boast about Chicago’s greatness. However, as we progress into a rapidly changing future, many of our great city’s downfalls become glaringly obvious as we strive to become a world class city. Poverty, corruption, education and gang violence are only few of the many social awareness issues that have surfaced within Chicago’s inner walls.   That’s where The Chi-Town Project steps in. We serve as a platform of fresh ideas, as a series of projects with the ability to ignite passion, discussion and action among Chicagoans for the greater good. Together we can strive for one ultimate goal: guiding Chicago to a better tomorrow. As a curation of social goodness, we celebrate not only the city’s identity but also the achievements that define what makes Chicagood.   Join us as we inspIre. dreAM. aCHIeve.

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Chicago’s new Super Bike Highway

It’s no secret Chicago believes biking will help boost it’s profile as a world class city. With that being said, Chicago’s Mayor- Rahm Emanuel announced another ambitious project to help boost it’s already 115 miles of bike lanes.

In four years, he wants to create 100 miles of protected bike paths — not just painted lines on the street but paths separated from car traffic by posts or other dividers. By next summer, he wants the city’s first large-scale bike-sharing program, starting with 3,000 bikes.

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Chicago: The 10th Best Biking City In America, According to Bike Score

Walk Score is a pretty well respected site that measures how walk-able a city. It’s simply a software algorithm that judges how walkable an address, neighborhood, or city is based on various data.

Walk Score recently launched a new service called Bike Score which examines how friendly biking is in the cities across America. Chicago managed to crack the top ten with the same score as NYC. Continue Reading →

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Urbs in Horto: Bloomingdale Trail is becoming a reality

Mayor Rahm is focusing on really making Chicago live up to its motto: “Urbs in Horto”, which means City in the Garden, by announcing over 800 new city projects aimed at revamping old parks, playgrounds and basketball courts. One in particular that stands out is the Bloomindale Trail, and it’s definitely looking like a reality. The trail took a significant step forward Thursday night when three design firms unveiled a carefully conceived, long-range plan meant to guide its development.

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Chicago is one of 2011 NRDC’s Smarter Cities For Transportation

Home to one of the largest and oldest transit systems in the country, the Chicago metropolitan region has long been a national transportation hub, moving 2 million bus and rail riders each day and 2.31 billion tons of freight each year. GO TO 2040, the regional plan of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning(CMAP), is guiding the area toward affordable and innovative ways to increase transit, fleet and freight efficiency, earning the region a place among the top 15 Smarter Cities for transportation.

Chicago was named one of 15 cities for Transporation in the 2011 Smarter Cities, a project launched by National Resource and Defense Council. Chicago was also named a smarter city for Energy in 2010.

 Home to the world’s first skyscraper, today Chicago is rising to the forefront in green architecture, boasting more Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified buildings than any other city in the U.S.

Smarter Cities highlights 3 of Chicago’s transportation innovation that has helped it be named the honors of 2011:

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Chicago Housing Authority launches website to collect ideas on transformation plan

The Chicago Housing Authority launched a new website looking for public input to begin dialogues on how to transform and develop the city’s public housing for tomorrow. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new leadership team is looking to lead the way on the CHA’s $1.6 billion Plan for Tranfomation program that started back in 2000.

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Is it the “EL” or “L”?

Grid Chicago asked a very interesting question:

What spelling do you prefer: “L” (The official CTA spelling) or “El” (used by Time Out Chicago and other publications)?

The CTA replied via it Twitter account:

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Architects May Be Our Last Hope in the Fight to Protect Our Lakes from the Asian Carp.

The Great Lakes have been on alert for some time now as an invasive species look to enter Lake Michigan and threaten our local ecosystem.

The only thing that is separating the carps from Lake Michigan are a series of not so practical and expensive electric fence barriers placed in the canals. After lawmakers and Army Corps of Engineers have failed to act an unlikely solution comes from Chicago’s Jeanne Gang, an architect that heads Studio Gang that has continuously shaken things up in the Architecture world with amazing and innovative designs such as The Aqua Tower.

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Chicago Plans to Become the Next Great American Biking City

It’s just one protected bike lane now, but the Chicago Department of Transportation has a grand vision of miles of bike lanes and a bike-sharing system to rival even the bike-friendliest cities.

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How to build better bike lanes in Chicago

NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, recently brought its “Cities for Cycling” roadshow to Chicago; it’s an initiative to spread good ideas about building bike infrastructure into cities around the country.

They wrapped it up nicely in this video which takes a closer look at the new Kinzie bike lane Chicago had built and compared it to other city’s approach. Chicago announced bold plans to become the next Great American Biking City. It’ll all be interesting to see how it all develops.

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Apps: Embark is The Most Beautiful Way to Travel Chicago Via Transit

Chicago wants to be a tech hub of America, but many of the city’s infrastructures and services don’t offer mobility or apps for your convenience. Leaves us scratching our heads a bit. Luckily we have third party apps and today we want to show you Embark, which is quite possibly the most beautiful and engaging transit app. Formerly known as Pandav, they developed an app for the metra and L for Chicago on the iphone. It’s accurate, reliable and easy to use with impressive ratings. Many Chicagoans are relying on Ride Metra and Ride the L for their transit needs. But it gets better.

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Chicago plans a new park that makes all other urban parks look like your puny backyard

Chicago has an ambitious plan to create the largest urban parks project in the lower 48 states. At a whopping 140,000-acres, the area south of Chicago that is now recovering from the economic and environmental fallouts of the industrial facilities that once flourished in the region, will be transformed to become a gigantic urban park system. It won’t quite be a single continuous park but rather a network of open spaces within the Calumet area.

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Navy Pier Redesign Plans revealed

The Navy Pier redesigns were revealed at the Museum of Contemporary Arts. There were some big and bold plans. With a modest budget of $85 million, the beloved and biggest midwest attraction that draws some 8.6 million visitors a year is planning to go through a major renovation.

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