Rethinking how cities and sports franchises work together
Chicago is facing an unprecedented moment: five professional sports franchises are seeking new or renovated stadiums at the same time. The old approach — teams propose, the city reacts, taxpayers worry — isn’t working. Each side seems to be talking past the others.
What’s missing isn’t expertise. Each party has all the experts they need in stadium design, development, and finance. What’s missing is a shared vision — a common understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve together.
Chicago Architecture Center
Three elements, inseparable.
Every successful urban stadium district follows this formula. Every failure abandons it.
The Chicago Architecture Center, working with Leitner, consulted with dozens of people from organizations in Chicago and across the country who understand stadiums and cities from every angle — the teams, the Federal Reserve, the City, the Chamber, corporations, developers, leading architects and planners, policy experts, and economic development organizations.
A working group of experienced thinkers kept pushing the project to see the bigger picture — not just helping advance the current round of talks, but reimagining what stadiums could do for Chicago.
What emerged challenged the project’s initial assumptions and expanded its ambitions. The report below offers a vision of what stadiums are and what role they should play in Chicago. Establishing a shared vision — a Chicago Model — can transform negotiations from parallel monologues into genuine dialogue.