Series examines how region’s history continues to shape metropolitan Chicago, with this installment focused on the 1950s-1970s, the suburban boom, and the postwar roots of regional governance
CHICAGO (June 26, 2026) — In the years following World War II, the Chicago metropolitan region expanded at a rapid pace. Federal highway investments carved corridors through farmland, making it possible to live farther from the urban core and pushing development into the collar counties. Tax incentives for commercial developers to build shopping malls and office parks helped the suburbs become more economically self-sufficient rather than just bedroom communities for the city. Population growth, rising household incomes, and increasing automobile ownership further accelerated suburban development, transforming the physical and economic landscape of the region.
As metropolitan Chicago grew, local governments faced the challenge of providing infrastructure, schools, public services, and transportation networks across an increasingly large and interconnected region. New residential subdivisions, commercial centers, and industrial parks reshaped patterns of settlement and economic activity, while the region’s expanding municipalities developed distinct local identities and governance structures. Unfortunately, this rapid period of development coincided with, and in many ways was shaped by, a period of legal discriminatory policies and practices that shaped how the region ultimately evolved. The cumulative result was a metropolitan area that became larger, more economically diverse, and more geographically complex. Differences in local tax bases, housing markets, and development patterns contributed to a varied regional landscape, creating governance and planning challenges that local governments would spend the next several decades addressing.
The Emergence of COGs
The rapid expansion of the Chicago metropolitan region created new challenges that individual municipalities increasingly struggled to address on their own, helping spur the emergence of early councils of governments (COGs). The transformation of the Chicago suburbs arrived with a cascade of practical problems for the region’s municipal leaders. Municipal boundaries that made sense in a slower era now cut across shared watersheds, transit corridors, and economic geographies. Growing populations needed new roads, water systems, and shared infrastructure that crossed municipal lines. And the local governments tasked with addressing these challenges were, almost by design, poorly equipped to address them alone.
The response was informal at first. Mayors and managers in geographically contiguous municipalities began convening to discuss problems that crossed their borders. Some of these conversations were little more than occasional lunches or supper clubs, while others grew into something more structured. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, a patchwork of subregional councils of governments began to take shape across the metropolitan area, each with its own origin story and particular set of concerns.
The Northwest Municipal Conference was among the earliest, formed in 1958 when eight northwest suburbs began meeting monthly to address shared concerns like water supply, flood control, refuse disposal, and police and fire coordination. The South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association followed in 1968, its formation driven by the mounting pressures of deindustrialization and economic disinvestment hitting south suburban communities hardest. The DuPage Mayors and Managers Conference emerged around the same time, when suburban mayors recognized that the county’s partisan politics at the time were working against their interests and that cooperation among themselves was the most effective response. Other councils followed different paths, some forming in direct response to federal transportation planning requirements before expanding their scope to address a broader range of shared challenges.
These early COGs were not uniform in their focus, membership, or priorities. Some concentrated on infrastructure and economic development, while others emphasized intergovernmental cooperation, transportation planning, and shared municipal services. What all of them shared was a basic recognition that some problems were too large or too geographically diffuse for any single municipality to address on its own. They were, in other words, learning the first lesson of regional governance: that the boundaries drawn on a map are not the same as the boundaries of the problems that governments are asked to solve.
Federal Funding Incentivizes Regional Planning
The COGs might have remained informal indefinitely had the federal government not intervened through the gradual accumulation of funding requirements that made regional coordination increasingly important.
The first significant catalyst was the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS), established in 1955 as an ad hoc partnership between the City of Chicago, Cook County, the State of Illinois, and the federal Bureau of Public Roads. For its first several years, CATS functioned primarily as a research project, staffed by planners and analysts to model travel patterns and project the infrastructure needs of a rapidly expanding metropolitan area. In 1962, the federal government required metropolitan areas to have a long-range comprehensive planning process involving local elected officials in order to receive transportation funding. As a result, CATS was transformed from a temporary study group into a permanent planning agency with a mandate to engage the region’s municipalities in long-range transportation planning. By 1965, the original CATS transportation plan had been adopted by the City of Chicago, 123 suburban municipalities, and all of the region’s COGs. While the process was not particularly visionary by today’s standards, it established a precedent for region-wide agreement on a shared planning framework as well as a set of institutional relationships among the COGs, the city, and state and federal agencies.
A second regional institution emerged during this same period through a different route. The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) was created by the Illinois General Assembly in 1957 following advocacy from a network of civic and planning organizations based in Chicago. Among the most influential was the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council (MHPC, now the Metropolitan Planning Council), which helped design the agency’s governmental structure in collaboration with state lawmakers. From its inception, NIPC’s executive body consisted of local government representatives from Chicago, Cook County, and the collar counties who oversaw a professional planning staff.
Unlike CATS, NIPC focused primarily on land use rather than transportation. It possessed no regulatory or taxing authority and instead functioned as an advisory body, producing plans, providing technical assistance to municipalities, and supporting federal funding applications. From the outset, NIPC sought to establish itself as a source of technical expertise and regional planning capacity. Throughout the 1960s, it worked to expand planning capabilities across northeastern Illinois and provided emerging COGs with technical resources and institutional connections that helped them develop more sophisticated agendas. In this way, NIPC played an important role in transforming informal networks of suburban mayors into more structured and capable subregional institutions.
Under President Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s, NIPC led regional efforts related to water infrastructure, sanitation, and environmental conservation, leveraging federal funding to support initiatives that individual municipalities could not accomplish alone.
As the political and fiscal environment changed during the 1970s, NIPC’s influence gradually waned. Federal retrenchment reduced the resources available for large-scale regional initiatives, while broader economic changes reshaped planning priorities across the metropolitan area.
Amid these changes, NIPC continued to advocate a model of voluntary regional cooperation. The commission supported the home-rule provisions of the 1970 Illinois Constitution, believing that municipalities with greater autonomy would be more willing partners in regional planning efforts. While this approach encouraged local participation, it also meant that NIPC’s effectiveness depended largely on its ability to build consensus among local governments. As regional priorities diversified during the late 1970s, maintaining that consensus became increasingly challenging, highlighting the limitations of a planning model that relied primarily on persuasion and technical expertise rather than formal authority.
Looking Ahead
By the mid-1980s, the Chicago metropolitan region had experienced three decades of growth, federal investment, and changing economic and fiscal conditions. CATS continued to function, its survival guaranteed by the federal transportation funding that made it institutionally necessary and ensured an ongoing framework for regional transportation planning. NIPC, which had played a leading role in promoting regional planning and providing technical assistance to local governments, saw its influence diminish as federal funding priorities shifted and resources for regional initiatives became more limited.
What this era produced, in retrospect, was a period of consolidation rather than expansion. The COGs became more professionally staffed and more institutionally coherent. Their relationships with state and federal agencies, facilitated by NIPC and CATS, became more sophisticated. The planning and coordination processes developed during this period helped establish enduring channels of communication among municipalities and across levels of government. Local leaders who participated in these organizations developed practical experience in intergovernmental cooperation that would prove valuable when new opportunities for regional collaboration emerged in the decades that followed.
About The Author
The series draws on two years of research by Katie Friedman, whose study of collaborative governance in the Chicago metropolitan region, recently published in 2025 in the journal Urban Governance, traced 75 years of regional institution-building across three distinct historical periods. Katie is currently a Program Manager with the Center for Equity, Effectiveness and Efficiency (C3E) and brings nearly a decade of experience working with local governments in the Chicago region.
Sources:
Planey, D. (2023). Regional planning and institutional norms in the United States: Civic society, Regional planning, and City-region building in the Chicago Metropolitan region. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 43(4), 958–969. 10.1177/0739456X20937346.
Lindstrom, B. (1997). Regional cooperation and sustainable growth: A study of nine councils of government in the northeastern Illinois region. Great Cities Institute.
Steffes, T. L. (2024). Structuring inequality: How schooling, housing, and tax policies shaped metropolitan development and education. University of Chicago Press.
Blog Series:
If you missed Part 1 of the Governing Through Change blog series, read it here:
