Founded in 1993, UIC's Great Cities Commitment combines extensive teaching and research resources with civic, community, corporate, governmental, and philanthropic partners in Chicago and throughout the world. UIC's 15 colleges incorporate into their educational programs opportunities to engage in both the challenges of a metropolitan environment and the joys of Chicago's inexhaustible cultural, social, and economic opportunities. UIC has made a commitment to great cities worldwide and through these programs celebrates how its partnerships can make a change for the better.

Capturing Chicago

Chicago in the Year 2000, also known as CITY2000, was a yearlong not-for-profit enterprise funded by the Comer Foundation, Inc. The project created a visual time capsule in which Chicagoans captured the look of Chicago in the first year of the second millennium. More than two hundred photographers produced five hundred thousand photographic negatives and approximately five hundred audio and videotapes, along with more than one thousand framed prints.

In 2001, Gary Comer, Lands' End founder, donated the CITY2000 archive to UIC's Richard J. Daley Library. The CITY2000 archive complements other photographic materials in the UIC library, such as the images dating from the late 1890s in the Jane Addams Memorial Collections. Photographs from both eras record Chicagoans from all social, economic, and ethnic groups. In addition to their significant documentary value, these collections contain works of important American photographers.

The images have been digitized and are available for viewing through the library's web site. The physical collection will be placed in conditions that will preserve this record of Chicago and its citizens to the year 3000 and beyond.