Sirens slice through the steel and glass of downtown, but the backdrop feels charged with something new. It is 2025, and Chicago PD still delivers hard-edged police drama, only now the cityscape carries a sharper technological pulse. A leaked production memo known as MD07 sheds light on the filming locations shaping the season ahead, revealing a Chicago that is recognizably authentic yet subtly advanced. The result is a gripping near-future vision that deepens the show’s trademark moral tension while using the city’s real architecture to push the story forward.
MD07 at a Glance: A Real Chicago with a Near-Future Edge
MD07 outlines a clear creative strategy: anchor the season in real neighborhoods and iconic corridors, then layer in measured touches of innovation and urban renewal. This is not a neon-drenched dystopia. It is the Chicago audiences know, nudged a few years down the road, where transit upgrades, digital art, and smarter infrastructure coexist with old pressures and new crimes. That tension fuels the show’s atmosphere, reinforcing the Intelligence Unit’s mission in a city that is changing faster than the rules can keep up.
Lower Wacker Drive Reimagined as a Transit Artery
Long a favorite location for Chicago PD, Lower Wacker Drive returns with an evolved presence. MD07 positions the under-level as a partially subterranean transit hub, amplifying its industrial mood with a sleeker, tech-forward sheen. Think glistening concrete, damp shadows, and a procession of automated vehicles whispering past. The production plans kinetic pursuits and standoffs that thread through this maze, using the tunnel’s glow and new digital signage as a backdrop for high-stakes action.
Chase Sequences in the Glow of Automation
Expect Voight’s team to tear through tight lanes and service corridors as the hum of driverless pods and automated kiosks reverberates off the walls. Holographic ads flicker across pillars and facades, lending motion and color to the darkness. The location becomes more than a set piece; it works as a metaphor for the city itself. Chicago’s hard-won resilience still underpins the streets, yet the sheen of progress casts fresh light on familiar corners. The grit is still there. It is simply refracted by new tech.
Pilsen’s Sustainable Shine and the Shadows Beneath
MD07 also spotlights a revitalized Pilsen, where the community’s celebrated art culture now intersects with sustainability projects and next-gen energy startups. Murals remain integral to the area’s character, and the season introduces digital projections that wash over warehouse walls, animating color and movement after sunset. This stylistic flourish underscores a deeper story: the complicated intersection of renewal, community identity, and exploitation.
Digital Murals, Green Tech, and New Crimes
In 2025, Pilsen’s cutting-edge green initiatives carry unintended consequences. The Intelligence Unit tracks cases tied to eco-terrorism and the illicit trade of components salvaged from decommissioned renewable tech. Battery modules, rare metals, and proprietary circuitry suddenly become black market commodities. That twist lets the show probe the economics of progress and the criminal ecosystems that emerge in its wake.
Atwater’s connection to local neighborhoods brings an emotional center to these episodes. His arc confronts an ethical thicket: safeguard the future without sidelining the present-day needs of residents. As the team follows leads through co-ops, microgrid facilities, and repurposed factories, Pilsen’s dual identity comes into focus. It is both a beacon of possibility and a battleground over who benefits from change.
Grant Park as the Stage for a Public Reckoning
Grant Park appears frequently this season, not as a postcard perfect lawn but as the city’s conscience in motion. MD07 frames the park as a rally point for demonstrations challenging expanded surveillance and data collection. The location’s open sightlines and skyline views create a bold contrast between green space and the invisible networks tracking it.
Protests, Drones, and the Security-Freedom Tightrope
Publicly sourced drone footage captures sweeping angles of crowds, banners, and police deployments. From discreet vantage points, the Intelligence Unit observes, evaluates, and intervenes when threats surface. The sequences layer urgency over a thorny question: how do you maintain safety without eroding liberty? That push and pull is written across the characters’ faces and the park’s pathways, turning Grant Park into a living forum for the city’s questions about power, oversight, and trust.
Inside District 21: A Modernized Precinct Built on a New Soundstage
While District 21’s exterior remains iconic, MD07 reveals a strategic interior shift. More sequences will be filmed on a new soundstage designed to portray a modernized precinct with fluid camera movement and flexible staging. The upgrade lets the series explore investigative tech in greater detail without losing the tactile realism that defines the squad room.
Tech Upgrades That Test the Team, Not Replace Them
The precinct’s refreshed design includes advanced crime lab benches, AI-boosted case analysis tools, and personalized biometric scanners at critical access points. The instruments accelerate the work, but they also complicate it. Data deluges can obscure the signal in the noise, and algorithms are only as good as the instincts guiding them. MD07 makes clear that the human element remains the show’s beating heart. Voight’s judgment, Burgess’s empathy, Ruzek’s resourcefulness, and Atwater’s community sense become more important, not less, as the machinery of policing grows more intricate.
How These Locations Drive Story, Stakes, and Style
The MD07 locations are not just production logistics; they are story engines. Lower Wacker’s reimagining elevates the show’s visual signature with layered reflections and dynamic motion. Pilsen’s evolution lets Chicago PD explore how innovation can both empower and exploit. Grant Park reframes public space as a site of civic debate and contested safety. District 21’s new interior empowers tighter character work and faster pacing, making room for investigative beats that swing from analog intuition to digital verification.
Each setting amplifies the series’ core themes: moral ambiguity, procedural rigor, and the cost of justice. By keeping the city recognizable while tilting it toward the near future, the production grounds high-stakes storytelling in places viewers can map and remember. The city becomes a character again, and this time its arc is about adaptation.
What This Means for the Future
Chicago PD in 2025 stands poised to balance street-level grit with a pragmatic view of how cities evolve. The MD07 blueprint suggests a season that is visually bold, thematically timely, and grounded in the realities of an urban center recalibrating for the next decade. Expect chases that carve through layered transit corridors, cases born from green-tech economies, and debates about surveillance that resonate beyond the frame.
The siren still sounds like it always has. What changes is everything around it: the way information moves, the places criminals hide, and the tools officers use to close the distance. By embracing a measured, credible futurism, the show keeps its soul while sharpening its edge. Chicago’s skyline remains familiar, but the ground beneath the Intelligence Unit’s boots is shifting. That friction is where the best stories live, and this season is ready to run straight through it.