Chicago Environmental Land Use Plan

  Write a term paper on an environmental land use plan/solution for the city of Chicago, Illinois. It can be in regards to any environmental land use issue or area in the city of Chicago. Please cite about 5 sources and some may be internet sources as long as they are credible. The term paper must be at least 2,500 words. Please see the official instructions below for the paper. Students will write and submit a well-written, research environmental land use plan on a specific topic for a specific geographic area. Consider an issue of concern and develop a possible solution for a given region. Students have wide latitude to be creative in identifying a topic that interests/excites them. In general students are more likely to find a topic that is too broad. Let me know if you want some guidance on narrowing a general topic you have. There are many components to any proposal for finding a proposed solution (keep in mind the difference between planning and management). Your emphasis might be trying to see if there is a problem or a better way to proceed; what the scale/impact of the problem is; an assessment of how solutions to similar problems elsewhere have succeeded/failed; a thought process of how a solution might be applied in your specific case and a/some unique challenges it might face; a proposal for a planning process for land use changes known to be happening; a proposal for potential land use changes; mitigation strategies for particular areas; or even hypothetical scenarios. Your particular sections (and in some cases subsections) will vary, but most documents written as a plan/proposal will generally contain these broad sections (modified from what I wrote for the ENS Graduate Student Handbook): Title – Keep this short and descriptive; strive for something both professional and engaging because it will be the first thing your reader sees. It’s OK to start your research process by writing a title, but expect your title to change several times. Abstract – This is a brief summary of the plan/research you are proposing. Write this section last! Because this is your work, abstracts usually do not contain references, but you can still talk about concepts. Lengths will normally be about 10% of the word count of the rest of the text (not counting References, Appendices, and other miscellany), and will normally be less than 300 words for even very long documents. Introduction – This may include some combination of these elements: What is the issue being addressed? What is the goal? Why is your study/paper important? Where is your study area? What makes your plan/proposal unique? Are there clear limitations to your plan/proposal? Introduce a theoretical perspective. Literature Review – A good review will help convince the reader that you know the material well; prove that you are the authority on the topic. A few suggestions towards that goal: Avoid quotes whenever possible; clear paraphrasing (with citation) better shows understand. Integrate concepts to avoid making it look like an annotated bibliography. What have others done on the area/topic? Methods – How are you going to do your work (surveys, focus groups, comparative policy analysis, GIS techniques, etc.)? What will you create (maps, action plans, policy statements, economic proposals, etc.) and how will they be used? Normally this section would require a detailed description of the analysis, but that’s beyond this course. References – For my benefit, start this section by saying what format you are following. Choose any style you want; if you don’t have a favorite APA is a good generic standard. Double check your references. Everything cited in text must be the list of references; everything in the list of references must be cited. Triple check your reference format. If attention to detail is not obvious here, it will cast doubt on the concepts you are trying to cite. Appendices – Include anything that is necessary but would interrupt the flow of text. This might be tables, locality maps, survey questions, etc.