Writing for Crain’s Chicago Business, Partner Adam Semel shared SOM’s conceptual vision for a new, South Side football stadium surrounded by a mixed-use district—part of a plan to keep the Chicago Bears in the team’s home city.

With the Chicago White Sox potentially moving to the South Loop, the land in and around Rate Field offers a transit-rich site for a new Bears stadium. The concept builds off his work with the Chicago Architecture Center, which produced a study on the potential of stadiums as neighborhood anchors. Identifying 30 acres for development, SOM’s vision uses a new stadium as a catalyst for lasting neighborhood investment, with improved pedestrian bridges, 1,500 new market-rate and affordable homes, community centers, and parks.

“Stadiums are major undertakings, requiring billions of dollars of investment in social, cultural, and civic infrastructure,” Semel writes. “Chicago is the world’s greatest city for modern architecture and also the greatest city for sports. Let’s build on that legacy with a next generation stadium-anchored district that is more innovative, sustainable, and community-centered than anything that came before.”