Can you find recycling on the Gold Coast? Mining pollution in Logan Square? A vegetarian restaurant in the far South Loop? Over the last seven years, Nadine Bopp’s students at the School of the Art Institute have. Their 21 neighborhood “green maps,” available on the school’s Web site, constitute one of the 400 registered projects in 51 countries that are officially part of the international Green Map System.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Gold Coast map’s color scheme is gentle blue and green, with yellow streets and an intricate border. It could be a Chamber of Commerce map, but there’s no marker or label for the Marriott or Nordstrom. In between them, on the south side of Illinois between State and Wabash, two red arrows chase each other. That’s the Green Map System icon for “reuse site,” so I looked under “renewable resources” in the map’s index. The Jardine Water Purification Plant just north of Navy Pier heads the list, followed by 11 more names and street addresses. The icon that caught my eye was identifying “Afterwards New and Used Books” at 23 E. Illinois.
What makes it part of a movement is that the School of the Art Institute has signed up to use the internationally recognizable Green Map® icons. At Green Maps’s 1,200-square-foot office in New York’s East Village, founder Wendy Brawer oversees four staffers, four interns, and a worm-composting bin. The group’s Web site, relaunched in May, is viewable in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian. Recent blog posts discuss the new Compost Green Map of Manhattan, announce (in Chinese) the launch of the “China Green Map Newsletter,” and display a YouTube video on the green map launch in the western Colombia city of Pereira. The group’s budget, mostly from foundation grants, is under $150,000 a year, which doesn’t include the volunteer and barter help it relies on.
In the winter and summer terms at SAIC, Bopp and each class of 20 students exercise their voice by producing a neighborhood map in an intensive course spanning 15 three-hour days.
Of course, some of these shops do jewelry repair as well. Might they not qualify for the benign double-arrow reuse icon—as does the Gold Coast car rental agency, because it promotes reuse of another product environmentalists have serious reservations about? Every dot on every map distills dozens of arguments like this and renders judgment.
