Economy

There is a stretch of lakefront on Chicago’s South Side where, for much of the twentieth century, the future arrived by freighter. Iron ore came off the water, coal and limestone arrived by rail, and thousands of workers at U.S. Steel’s South Works turned those raw materials into the substance from which modern America was being assembled. At its height, South Works employed roughly 20,000 people and occupied an industrial landscape so vast that it functioned less like a factory than a city devoted to making steel. Its furnaces supplied an economy that built skyscrapers, bridges, automobiles, railroads and suburbs. Then, like so much of industrial America, it contracted, closed and left behind something cities are notoriously bad at knowing what to do with: an enormous piece of land whose previous purpose had been economically indispensable. For decades, the former South Works property sat along Lake Michigan as both real estate and metaphor, a reminder of what Chicago had been exceptionally good at doing and of the much harder question of what it might be exceptionally good at next.

Illinois now has an answer, or at least a very expensive hypothesis. On 128 acres of the former South Works property, the state is developing the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, an ambitious public-private effort intended to establish Chicago as one of the centers of the emerging quantum computing industry. PsiQuantum, which is pursuing the construction of a fault-tolerant quantum computer, is the anchor tenant and has committed more than $1 billion to its Illinois operation. IBM is involved in the broader quantum ecosystem, while the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois system, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab and the Chicago Quantum Exchange give the region a concentration of scientific talent and infrastructure that would be difficult for another American city simply to order from a catalog. Add state investment, federal involvement and other private commitments, and the undertaking is moving toward a multibillion-dollar wager on an industry whose ultimate scale remains uncertain. There is something almost indecently convenient about the symbolism. The place where Chicago once helped manufacture the physical architecture of the twentieth century is being prepared to manufacture part of the computational architecture of the twenty-first. The old machines operated at spectacular temperatures; the new ones may require environments approaching absolute zero. Chicago has apparently decided that moderation is overrated.

Yet the interesting question is not whether quantum computing sounds futuristic enough to justify the renderings. Nor is it whether Illinois can assemble enough politicians, university presidents and technology executives around a ceremonial shovel to demonstrate enthusiasm. Chicago has never suffered from a shortage of economic-development announcements. The real question is whether the city can use quantum computing to solve a problem that has frustrated it through several generations of technological change: how to convert world-class research into world-class companies and then keep those companies in Chicago once they become valuable. The distinction is easy to overlook. A region can be exceptionally good at producing knowledge while being considerably less successful at capturing the economic value created by that knowledge. Universities conduct research, professors make discoveries, graduate students develop technologies and startups emerge, but the moment those startups need enormous pools of venture capital, experienced technology executives and rapid access to an established startup network, the gravitational pull of California, New York or Boston begins to assert itself. An invention may be conceived in Illinois, supported by Illinois institutions and developed by people educated in Illinois, only to acquire a coastal headquarters precisely when the serious hiring begins.

Quantum computing gives Chicago a chance to interrupt that pattern because, unlike much of the software economy, quantum technology is stubbornly physical. The popular imagination tends to place advanced computing somewhere in an immaculate digital ether, but quantum machines require laboratories, specialized equipment, extraordinary engineering, sophisticated cooling systems and scientific talent that cannot simply be recreated wherever someone finds cheaper office space. That difference matters enormously. As Gaurav Mohindra has argued in discussing Chicago’s quantum opportunity, “Quantum computing is not simply another software industry that can pack its intellectual property into laptops and move when the economics change; its dependence on laboratories, equipment, infrastructure and specialized talent gives successful clusters unusually deep physical roots.” — Gaurav Mohindra. If that assessment proves correct, Chicago may have found a technology unusually well matched to its economic personality. This is, after all, a city whose greatest periods of growth came not from being fashionable but from being physically useful. Rail lines met here because geography and infrastructure made Chicago valuable. Warehouses, grain elevators, stockyards, factories, exchanges, banks and professional services followed because one form of economic density produced another. Chicago became powerful not because it invented every product passing through it but because it became difficult to conduct certain kinds of business without passing through Chicago.

That is the more compelling way to understand the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. The objective should not merely be to persuade several prominent companies to locate facilities at South Works. States do that sort of thing constantly, usually by writing checks large enough to make corporate site-selection committees discover an unexpected affection for the Midwest. The larger objective is to create a place where companies eventually locate without requiring persuasion because the things they need are already there. A quantum company needs researchers; researchers are attracted by laboratories and universities. Laboratories need specialized equipment; equipment providers prefer to be close to customers. Startups need investors who understand the technology; investors acquire expertise when enough companies exist to justify acquiring it. Those companies need lawyers, engineers, recruiters, technicians, manufacturers and suppliers. Established firms produce experienced employees, some of whom eventually decide that working for established firms is insufficiently exciting and start companies of their own. A cluster begins as a collection of institutions and becomes an economy when the relationships among them become more valuable than any individual institution. Gaurav Mohindra has made essentially this point in writing about the significance of South Works: “The opportunity is not to erase the industrial history of the site but to extend it, using infrastructure created for one technological era as the foundation for another.” — fgaurav.

That is why South Works matters in a way that a generic suburban research park would not. Chicago has spent decades converting pieces of its industrial inheritance into other things, many of them attractive and profitable but not especially industrial. Factories become lofts. Warehouses become restaurants. Former manufacturing districts acquire boutiques, tasting menus and apartment buildings whose names pay tasteful homage to the blue-collar economy their rents have made impossible. Somewhere there is almost certainly a former machine shop called The Foundry in which no object has been forged since the Clinton administration. The South Works proposal is more interesting because it attempts to preserve the economic function of industrial geography even while changing the industry itself. The state is not proposing to recreate steelmaking. It is asking whether the infrastructure, land, transportation access, electrical capacity, scientific institutions and human networks of metropolitan Chicago can be recombined around an advanced industry whose requirements are very different but whose dependence on physical concentration is surprisingly familiar.

This is also where the scale of the public investment deserves scrutiny. Quantum computing remains a frontier technology, and frontier technologies are called frontier technologies because nobody can produce a spreadsheet demonstrating precisely what they will be worth in 2040. Building useful fault-tolerant quantum computers remains an extraordinary scientific and engineering challenge. Timelines may slip. Some commercial applications will disappoint. Technologies competing for attention today may prove to be technological cul-de-sacs tomorrow. Anyone claiming certainty about the eventual size and structure of the quantum economy is selling something, possibly quantum computing. Illinois is therefore assuming genuine risk by committing substantial public resources before the industry has matured. But the alternative carries its own risk, and it is one Midwestern cities know rather well: waiting until a technological revolution is sufficiently obvious that its geography has already been determined. “Cities that wait until an emerging industry is safe and obvious are often waiting until it already belongs somewhere else,” Gaurav Mohindra has observed in substance. “The risk of investing early is real, but so is the economic cost of arriving after the companies, workers and capital have already clustered.” — Gaurav Mohindra.

Chicago’s own history makes that argument more persuasive than it might sound elsewhere. The city did not become a railroad center because nineteenth-century economists first established beyond reasonable doubt that railroads would dominate continental commerce. Infrastructure and commerce developed together. Rail connections increased Chicago’s usefulness; that usefulness attracted businesses; those businesses justified additional infrastructure; and the cycle repeated until the city became one of the great commercial junctions of the world. Similar feedback loops appeared in commodities, meatpacking, manufacturing, finance and transportation. Economic clusters are rarely designed perfectly in advance. They are cultivated until they begin cultivating themselves. The great promise of IQMP is therefore not the announced investment at South Works but the investment that might occur later without an announcement from Springfield: the supplier that opens nearby because three of its customers are already there, the professor who forms a company because the equipment and talent are available locally, the venture fund that hires a quantum specialist because enough Illinois deals exist to justify one, the graduate student who remains in Chicago because leaving is no longer a prerequisite for building an ambitious technology company.

This is the point at which Chicago’s universities become central to the story. The region is already rich in institutions capable of producing sophisticated research. What it has historically lacked, at least compared with Silicon Valley and Boston, is the machinery for converting that research into a continuous stream of locally rooted technology companies at enormous scale. Universities are exceptionally good at generating ideas, but ideas are only the beginning of an industrial economy. Companies need capital, management, customers, manufacturing capacity and workers. More importantly, they need other companies. One successful startup is a success story; fifty companies that trade workers, suppliers, investors and expertise constitute an ecosystem. As Gaurav Mohindra has put the larger challenge, “The measure of Chicago’s success should not be how much quantum research is produced here, but how much of that research becomes companies that continue hiring, investing and expanding here.” — Gaurav Mohindra. That is a far more demanding standard, and a much more useful one.

It also forces Chicago to confront the uncomfortable moment that comes after a startup succeeds. Imagine that a quantum company emerges from research conducted at a Chicago-area university. Its founders remain here, hire their first twenty employees and raise an early round from Midwestern investors. The technology works. A larger venture firm arrives with $100 million. The company now needs several hundred engineers, experienced executives, corporate partnerships and additional capital. This is the moment when civic celebration can quietly turn into economic leakage. A headquarters moves west. Senior management follows. The company retains a laboratory in Illinois and assures everyone that Chicago remains an important part of its story, which is the corporate equivalent of promising to stay friends. Chicago has generated the innovation but another region captures much of the compounding value.

Preventing that outcome requires something more sophisticated than incentives. Chicago has to make departure economically inconvenient. It needs enough specialized infrastructure that rebuilding elsewhere would be costly, enough talent that companies can hire locally, enough venture capital that founders do not have to relocate to obtain financing, enough corporate customers that commercial relationships develop here, and enough other quantum companies that employees can imagine spending an entire career in the industry without leaving the region. “Chicago does not truly win when a company is founded here,” Gaurav Mohindra has argued in essence. “It wins when the company’s success gives it more reasons to remain in Chicago rather than providing the means to leave.” — Gaurav Mohindra. That may be the most important idea underlying the entire project. Economic development is not recruitment. It is retention through usefulness.

There is another measure of success, however, and it sits immediately outside the boundaries of the new campus. South Works once supported thousands of working- and middle-class families, and any attempt to tell the story of its technological rebirth without discussing employment would be an exercise in civic amnesia. Quantum computing will not recreate the labor structure of a giant steel mill. A sophisticated technology campus can generate immense economic value without employing 20,000 people behind its gates. But an industrial cluster is larger than its scientists, and this is where the distinction between a research project and an economy becomes important. Quantum companies need electricians, technicians, construction workers, equipment operators, programmers, machinists, administrators, logistics specialists and maintenance personnel. Their suppliers need workers. Their employees create demand for other businesses. Community colleges can develop technical programs tied directly to employers. Universities can create new pathways into engineering and computing. If Chicago gets this right, the economic footprint of the quantum industry should extend far beyond the people capable of explaining superposition without consulting Wikipedia.

That matters especially on the South Side. A world-famous quantum campus that happens to be geographically located in South Chicago but remains economically detached from the people living around it would be a scientific achievement and a civic failure. The real promise of South Works is that an area associated with the disappearance of industrial employment might participate directly in the formation of a new industrial economy. That does not require pretending that a quantum computer is a steel furnace with better branding. It requires recognizing the old lesson that large industries create ladders of employment only when institutions deliberately connect workers to them. Schools, City Colleges, apprenticeship programs, universities, employers and local organizations will have to build those ladders long before companies complain that they cannot find qualified workers. Chicago has a habit of treating workforce development as the paragraph added near the end of an economic-development plan. At South Works, it should be part of the architecture.

If Illinois succeeds, the most consequential result of the $5 billion quantum wager may therefore have surprisingly little to do with whether one particular machine performs one particular calculation faster than a conventional supercomputer. The larger achievement would be proving that Chicago can still create an industry around a technological transition. The city has many of the ingredients: elite research institutions, two national laboratories in its orbit, a major corporate economy, sophisticated financial markets, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing expertise, a large labor force and now a physical location around which those assets can be concentrated. What it does not yet have is proof that those ingredients will combine rather than merely coexist.

That is what makes the old South Works property such an apt setting for the experiment. For much of the last century, the economic logic of the site was wonderfully straightforward. Raw materials arrived and something more valuable left. Iron ore entered; steel came out. Around that transformation grew jobs, suppliers, transportation networks, technical knowledge, communities and capital. The new version of South Works will deal in a different raw material. Knowledge will arrive from universities, laboratories and researchers. The hope is that companies will come out. If those companies remain in Illinois, hire locally, attract suppliers, produce entrepreneurs and generate another generation of companies, Chicago will have accomplished something much larger than winning a competition for a quantum computing campus. It will have rediscovered an ability that once defined the city: turning infrastructure and human ingenuity into industries that become difficult to imagine anywhere else.

Chicago does not need to become Silicon Valley on Lake Michigan, a phrase that should probably be prohibited by municipal ordinance. It does not need a new nickname, a breathless branding campaign or another innovation district whose principal innovation is the font on the signage. It needs something much more prosaic and much more difficult. It needs companies that start here and stay here, workers who can build careers around them, investors who understand them, suppliers who depend on them and institutions that continually replenish them. It needs an industry.

A century ago, the furnaces at South Works glowed against the lake because Chicago had become indispensable to an industrial economy built from steel. Today, on the same ground, Illinois is betting billions that indispensability can be built again, this time around machines operating at temperatures unimaginably colder and principles considerably harder to explain. Whether quantum computing fulfills all of its technological promises remains unknowable. Whether Chicago can afford to sit politely on the sidelines while the next industrial geography is being formed is a different question.

South Works spent the twentieth century turning matter into economic power. Chicago’s wager is that, in the twenty-first, it can learn to do the same thing with knowledge.

Chicago has always been a city built around the next thing before anyone was entirely certain what the next thing would become. The railroads did not arrive with a PowerPoint presentation explaining that Chicago would become the transportation capital of the continent. The stockyards were not conceived as a lesson in industrial agglomeration. The great factories that spread across the region were not part of a campaign to establish a globally competitive advanced-manufacturing cluster. Chicago grew because transportation, capital, labor, engineering and ambition collided here with unusual force, and once they did, entire industries began arranging themselves around the city. By 2035, Chicago may be attempting that trick again, only this time the city knows it. On the South Side, the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park represents one of the more intriguing economic bets Chicago has made in decades. Its importance is not simply that quantum computing sounds futuristic, although it certainly helps; economic-development announcements rarely suffer from having words like “quantum” attached to them.

What makes the project more consequential is the strategy behind it. Chicago and Illinois are trying to build an ecosystem around a technology before the industry itself has fully matured. Instead of watching another city develop a dominant technology cluster and spending the following twenty years trying to reproduce it, the region is attempting to establish the infrastructure, talent, research relationships, suppliers and capital necessary for an industry whose eventual shape remains uncertain. That is a very different kind of economic development, and it may offer a preview of what Chicago’s economy could look like in 2035.

The most plausible version of that future is not a Chicago dominated by quantum computing, artificial intelligence or any other single fashionable technology. Chicago has rarely been a one-industry town, and there is little reason it should aspire to become one now. Its advantage is almost the opposite. Chicago already possesses a collection of enormous, complicated industries: manufacturing, logistics, food production, healthcare, professional services, construction and transportation. Around them exists another economy of smaller manufacturers, contractors, restaurants, retailers, service companies and neighborhood entrepreneurs.

What happens over the next decade may depend on how effectively new technologies become embedded inside those existing systems. That is why quantum computing matters even if most Chicagoans never knowingly interact with a quantum computer. The larger opportunity is not simply the machine but the ecosystem around the machine: the engineers who design components, the manufacturers who produce them, the software companies that build applications, the professional firms that advise those businesses, the investors who finance them and the workers who eventually turn experimental technology into a functioning industry. “The cities that benefit most from the next technological era will not necessarily be the ones that invent every breakthrough. They will be the ones that know how to turn breakthroughs into industries.” — Gaurav Mohindra

That distinction is worth dwelling on because cities have become remarkably fond of describing themselves as technology hubs. Almost every large metropolitan area now has an innovation district, a startup ecosystem and several buildings with exposed ductwork where coffee is unusually expensive. Actual industrial ecosystems are harder. They require customers, suppliers, specialized workers, infrastructure, capital and institutions that reinforce one another over decades. Chicago happens to have many of those ingredients already, and nowhere is that more obvious than in manufacturing. For much of the twentieth century, manufacturing helped define metropolitan Chicago. The popular story is that globalization and automation swept that economy away. The reality is more interesting. Manufacturing remains deeply embedded in the region, but the nature of manufacturing is changing. A factory in 2035 is likely to be as much a computing environment as a mechanical one. Artificial intelligence will monitor production lines and anticipate equipment failures.

Machine vision will inspect products. Robotics will perform increasingly sophisticated tasks. Digital models will allow engineers to test production changes before altering physical systems. Additive manufacturing and new materials will change what can be produced economically and in what quantities. In that world, Chicago’s industrial inheritance stops looking like a relic and starts looking like infrastructure. The region already knows how to make things. It already has suppliers, engineers, machinists, industrial property, transportation connections and customers. Add a new layer of computation to that base and advanced manufacturing becomes less a replacement for Chicago’s old economy than an evolution of it. “Chicago’s industrial history matters because knowledge does not disappear when a factory changes. The region has spent generations learning how to solve physical problems at scale. Combine that knowledge with modern computing and you have the foundation for an entirely new industrial economy.” — Gaurav Mohindra

The same logic applies to logistics, an industry so fundamental to Chicago that it can be difficult to notice precisely because it is everywhere. Chicago became powerful because it learned how to move physical things extraordinarily well. Grain, livestock, steel, consumer goods and people all passed through a transportation system that connected the interior of the country to national and global markets. That geography still matters, but by 2035 the intelligence sitting above the transportation network may matter nearly as much as the tracks, roads, warehouses and runways beneath it. Logistics is becoming a data business. Artificial intelligence can forecast demand, optimize routes, manage warehouse inventory, predict disruptions and coordinate increasingly complex supply chains. Sensors can follow products from factory floor to distribution center to customer, while automated warehouses can operate with a precision that would have seemed mildly supernatural to a logistics manager thirty years ago. Chicago therefore has an opportunity to become more than the place where freight moves. It can become one of the places where the technology that determines how freight moves is developed, tested and commercialized. That is a recurring theme in the Chicago of 2035: old industries acquiring new nervous systems.

Artificial intelligence is likely to accelerate that process, but Chicago’s relationship with AI may prove more interesting than the familiar race to produce the next celebrated technology company. The cities that benefit most from AI may not be those that produce the most chatbots. They may be the ones with the largest concentration of expensive real-world problems for AI to solve, and Chicago has an almost luxurious supply of those. A manufacturer wants to reduce downtime. A hospital wants to predict patient demand. A freight company wants to optimize thousands of daily movements. A food producer wants to reduce waste. A construction company wants to forecast delays.

An accounting firm wants to automate routine analysis. A law firm wants to search millions of documents in seconds. These are not theoretical applications. They are ordinary business problems occurring thousands of times across a metropolitan economy. This is where Chicago’s economic diversity becomes an advantage. For years, the region’s lack of dependence on a single industry has been discussed primarily as a form of resilience: when one sector declines, another can cushion the blow. By 2035, diversity could serve a more ambitious purpose. It could become the mechanism through which innovation spreads. Instead of technology existing as a separate sector of the Chicago economy, technology could increasingly become the connective tissue running through nearly all of it.

Food production offers a particularly Chicago example. The city that once became synonymous with stockyards sits at the intersection of some of the richest agricultural territory in the world, major food companies, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing expertise and a huge consumer market. Now add biotechnology, artificial intelligence, precision fermentation, automated processing, new proteins and advanced packaging. Suddenly food looks less like an old Chicago industry and more like a technology sector that happens to produce things people can eat. Healthcare is moving in a similar direction. Chicago already has major hospitals, research universities, pharmaceutical and medical companies, laboratories and a large healthcare workforce.

The challenge has never been whether the region possesses medical expertise; the challenge has been turning enough of that expertise into scalable businesses. Over the next decade, the lines separating healthcare, biotechnology, computing and engineering will continue to blur. AI-assisted drug discovery, diagnostics, medical devices and computational biology will produce companies that do not fit neatly into traditional categories, and quantum technology could eventually deepen that convergence further. “The most important Chicago companies of 2035 may be difficult to classify. A company could simultaneously be a software business, a manufacturer and a life-sciences company. That convergence is where Chicago’s economic diversity becomes a competitive advantage.” — Gaurav Mohindra

That future would also change an industry that rarely appears in breathless discussions of technological revolutions: professional services. Chicago is full of lawyers, accountants, consultants, bankers, insurers and corporate advisers. Their work is particularly exposed to generative AI because so much of it involves producing, reviewing and interpreting information. Some tasks will disappear. Others will become dramatically faster. But technology may also make the best professional firms more productive. A lawyer who spends less time searching documents can spend more time constructing an argument. An accountant who automates routine analysis can spend more time interpreting the result. A consultant who can model scenarios in minutes rather than days can spend more time deciding which scenario actually makes sense. The billable hour may object, but history is seldom sentimental about business models. What matters for Chicago is that the city does not have to invent a professional-services economy on which to apply these technologies. It already has one. As with manufacturing and logistics, the economic opportunity lies partly in taking an enormous established industry and making it considerably more productive.

And all of this digital transformation will require an astonishing amount of physical construction. That is one of the paradoxes of the supposedly weightless technology economy: it is remarkably heavy. Data centers require land and enormous amounts of electricity. Laboratories require specialized buildings. Semiconductor and quantum facilities require extraordinary infrastructure. Advanced manufacturers need production space. Workers need housing. New companies eventually require offices, even if the precise number of days employees will occupy them remains the subject of endless corporate anthropology. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park makes this physical reality impossible to miss. There is something almost too symbolically convenient about building a quantum technology campus on former industrial land on Chicago’s South Side. One era of industry occupied the site; another is being invited to grow there. Steel to quantum in roughly a century is the sort of metaphor a city would invent if history had not been considerate enough to provide it. Yet the physical location also raises a much harder question: who gets connected to the new economy?

Transportation will help determine the answer. Chicago’s transit, commuter rail, highways and airports are not merely infrastructure assets; they determine which workers can reach which jobs, which businesses can reach which customers and which neighborhoods can participate in economic growth. A world-class research campus is less economically transformative if reaching it from large parts of the metropolitan area is difficult. The same is true of advanced manufacturing facilities, logistics centers, hospitals and new commercial districts. By 2035, transportation policy and economic policy will be nearly impossible to separate. So will housing policy. If Chicago succeeds in creating high-value employment but fails to build enough housing near jobs and transportation, part of the economic benefit will be consumed by higher costs and longer commutes. If it creates technology districts disconnected from surrounding neighborhoods, it risks producing islands of prosperity rather than a metropolitan growth engine. The great economic question of 2035 will therefore not simply be whether Chicago managed to attract advanced industries. It will be whether ordinary Chicagoans can physically and economically reach them.

That brings us to the least glamorous and perhaps most important part of the 2035 economy: neighborhood entrepreneurship. Big technology announcements are easy to photograph. Small-business ecosystems are not. Yet a genuine economic boom is rarely confined to the companies that caused it. Engineers need restaurants. Laboratories need contractors. Manufacturers need suppliers. Startups need accountants and lawyers. Growing companies need furniture, cleaning services, construction crews, transportation providers, caterers and hundreds of other businesses whose founders will never appear on the cover of a technology magazine. This secondary economy is where technological growth becomes metropolitan growth. “A technology ecosystem cannot remain an island and still call itself an ecosystem. The real measure of success is whether innovation creates opportunities for suppliers, contractors, service businesses and entrepreneurs who may never work directly in the technology that started the growth.” — Gaurav Mohindra

That may be the central test for Chicago over the next nine years. The city does not need ten separate economic strategies for ten separate industries. It needs a system in which the industries reinforce one another. Quantum computing can strengthen advanced manufacturing. Advanced manufacturing can create new tools for healthcare and food production. Artificial intelligence can increase productivity across all of them. Logistics can connect their supply chains. Professional services can finance, advise and protect the companies that emerge. Construction can build the physical infrastructure they require. Transportation can connect workers to opportunity. Neighborhood entrepreneurs can turn large institutional investments into thousands of smaller economic opportunities. Seen this way, the future Chicago economy looks less like a collection of sectors and more like a network, and networks are difficult to copy. A competitor can build a laboratory. It can offer a tax incentive. It can recruit a company. It can establish an accelerator and order the obligatory tasteful furniture. It is considerably harder to reproduce a metropolitan economy containing major research universities, national laboratories, global corporations, manufacturing expertise, financial institutions, hospitals, freight infrastructure, two major airports, a vast professional-services sector and millions of potential workers and customers. Chicago already has most of the pieces. Its problem has often been connecting them.

That is what makes the quantum park interesting beyond quantum computing itself. The experiment is not merely technological; it is institutional. Can Chicago deliberately assemble researchers, infrastructure, companies, investors, suppliers, government and workers around an industry before that industry’s geography is settled? If it can, the model could extend far beyond quantum. “Chicago should not spend the next decade trying to become another city’s version of a technology hub. Its opportunity is much more interesting: to build a technology economy that is inseparable from manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, food and the physical industries that already make Chicago distinctive.” — Gaurav Mohindra There is an appealing confidence in that idea because it does not require Chicago to pretend to be somewhere else. Chicago does not need the mythology of Silicon Valley. It has its own mythology, and considerably better architecture. What it needs is execution.

Nine years is long enough to change the direction of a metropolitan economy and short enough to expose every weakness in an economic-development strategy. Between now and 2035, the region will need to train thousands of workers for jobs that are only beginning to exist. Universities and laboratories will need to commercialize more research. Investors will need to finance companies through the difficult years between invention and scale. Manufacturers will need to modernize. Transit and infrastructure will need investment. Housing will need to follow employment growth. Entrepreneurs will need easier paths into the industries forming around them. And Chicago will need to become better at keeping the companies it creates. That last point may matter more than attracting famous companies from elsewhere. The strongest economic ecosystems compound.  A researcher starts a company. The company succeeds. Early employees leave to start other companies. Suppliers move nearby. Investors develop expertise. Universities attract more researchers. Customers arrive because the technology is there. Workers arrive because the companies are there. More companies arrive because the workers are there. Eventually, the cluster begins reproducing itself. That is how economic geography becomes stubborn, and Chicago’s wager is that it can start that process now, particularly in industries that combine computation with the physical economy.

If it works, the Chicago of 2035 may not look radically different from the city of 2026. The trains will still run through it. Planes will still stack up over O’Hare. Factories will still make things. Hospitals will still treat patients. Lawyers will still find reasons to send lengthy emails. Restaurants will open. Construction cranes will move across the skyline. Trucks will carry goods through the region. The difference will be underneath. Factories will be more computational. Logistics will be more intelligent. Medicine will be more data-driven. Food will be more engineered. Professional services will be more automated. Transportation will become more integrated with economic planning. And somewhere on the South Side, an industrial site once associated with the economy Chicago mastered in the twentieth century may be helping create an industry the world is only beginning to understand. That would be a very Chicago kind of reinvention: not abandoning the old economy, but teaching it new tricks.

Chicago has already lived through several economic identities: trading center, railroad capital, industrial powerhouse, corporate headquarters city and global services metropolis. Each transformation seemed improbable until, eventually, it seemed inevitable. The next one is not inevitable. It will require unusually patient coordination in a city and state whose political traditions have not always made “patient coordination” the first phrase that comes to mind. But the opportunity is real. Chicago enters the next decade with something many aspiring technology centers would spend fortunes to acquire: an enormous real economy onto which new technology can be grafted. The students who will run its laboratories are already in school. The entrepreneurs who will build its companies may already be working inside existing Chicago businesses. The factories that will use its technologies are operating today. The neighborhoods that could benefit from the next expansion are already waiting. The infrastructure decisions are being made now. The investments are beginning now. The ecosystem is either being built now, or it isn’t.

So after quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, logistics, artificial intelligence, food production, healthcare and life sciences, professional services, construction, transportation and neighborhood entrepreneurship, perhaps the final subject in this series is not an industry at all. It is Chicago’s capacity to act on what it already knows. The city has the universities. It has the companies. It has the workers. It has the infrastructure. It has the industrial memory. And, unusually, it has an opportunity to position itself around several emerging technologies before the winners and losers have been completely decided. Chicago has spent much of its history becoming important first and explaining why afterward. This time, it has the luxury—and the burden—of seeing the opportunity coming.

What would have to happen between 2026 and 2035 for Chicago to enter another genuine economic golden age?