In late January, Cook County’s Bureau of Technology issued something quite remarkable: 1.96 million footprints for all buildings in the county with detailed attributes. Todd Schuble, director of geographic information systems for the county, said Chicago will have a complete 3D model by year’s end. The city is about to know itself in a way that’s extremely detailed.
That is genuinely impressive. But cities that reached this level of spatial intelligence before Chicago are now navigating a different kind of crisis: not a lack of data but a failure to govern it wisely. One city got it right. Chicago should study all of them.
London has had one of the world’s most advanced 3D spatial datasets for many years. But the city has spent two decades struggling to solve its most visible planning failure: a housing crisis that’s displacing working-class people from one neighborhood after another. Knowing exactly who owned what what made it easier for global investors to plan their buying strategies rather than for city planners to protect affordability requirements.
The maps were more useful to hedge funds than housing authorities, in other words.
Chicago is not London, but the risk is similar. A high-resolution dataset of 1.96 million buildings, available for anyone to use, will inevitably be exploited by property analytics firms and speculative investors far before community planners on the South Side.
In Asia, a real-time 3D model of Singapore is used for everything from solar analysis to pedestrian flow simulation, and it is a technical success in every way. But urbanists who have looked at Singapore report a city that works with an almost inhuman efficiency, in which the spontaneity of life has been engineered out of the urban environment.
Chicago’s neighborhoods, from Logan Square to Pilsen and Bronzeville, are interesting because they are not optimized; they are not efficient. A 3D model that makes it easier to enforce conformity with zoning regulations, or that makes informal commercial activity more visible to the eye of the regulator, could be used to erase the very texture of these places that makes them interesting in the first place.
New York has invested heavily in spatial data infrastructure — building footprints, 3D models and parcel-level datasets. But researchers studying housing equity have documented a persistent problem. Informal housing stock — basement conversions, unpermitted accessory units and multifamily adaptations — is systematically absent from official datasets. These gaps are not random. They cluster in lower-income neighborhoods, in communities where residents have had less access to the permitting process.
If the Cook County dataset more accurately reflects the formal space than the lived realities of Austin, Englewood or South Shore, then it is not a neutral asset; it is a document that makes some parts of the city legible and other parts easy to ignore.
I know this tension from the inside. In 2015, as a lidar engineer at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, I was part of a team of roughly 350 engineers producing datasets for Istanbul and the neighboring city of Kocaeli, tens of millions of points capturing every rooftop, every slope, every watershed boundary across two of Turkey’s most densely populated urban regions.
Istanbul’s planners were looking past 2045, modeling whether the city’s freshwater infrastructure could sustain a projected population surge. The answer pointed toward routing the Melen River system from Kocaeli into Istanbul — a multidecade solution to a multidecade problem. Without that lidar foundation, you cannot model flow, elevation change or pipe routing at the necessary resolution.
What allowed that project to work wasn’t the technology. It was the institutional alignment around the technology. Municipal engineers, national ministries and regional water utilities were organized around the question: “What does this city need 30 years from now?” The data was designed to meet a horizon like that. The governance was designed to meet a horizon like that.
This is the standard that Chicago should hold itself to. The county now has the data. The question is: Is anyone in this fragmented regional structure asking what Chicago needs to be in 2050? And is this data being built to answer that question?
Data without a time horizon is not planning. It is cartography.
London speculated with its data. Singapore overoptimized. New York mapped around its most vulnerable residents.
But Istanbul showed that when data and governance move together, cities can think in decades rather than budget cycles.
Cook County now has a map of extraordinary detail. Chicago, for its part, already has the framework: Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s ON TO 2050 plan and World Business Chicago’s Chicago 2050 initiative point toward a shared regional vision.
The question is whether the new dataset will be built into that vision — or whether 1.96 million building footprints will become the most precise record of a city that still could not connect its maps to its plans.
Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union.
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