Universities And Urban Transformation
The relationship between universities and urban neighborhoods must be strengthened.
North Central College, a small private college adjacent to downtown Naperville, IL, is a community anchor that has played a key role in the growth of the entire Naperville community. Source: northcentralcollege.edu
I’ve always been intrigued by the role of universities in the growth and development of cities. It’s well known that universities can have an outsized role on smaller towns and cities, helping them to outperform similarly sized cities in terms of economic opportunity and quality of life. Universities can have a huge impact, whether they are a large public flagship institution in a small or midsize city, or a small liberal arts college in a tiny hamlet.
It’s no mystery that the cities that have made the biggest urban revitalization leaps over the last 25-30 years have had footholds in economic sectors that were poised to grow our contemporary economy, like tech, finance, media, biomedical sciences and entertainment. Yet it’s also no mystery that cities near some of the best universities in the nation have used that proximity to attract high-level talent and feed the local talent pipeline. There’s a symbiotic relationship between New York City and Columbia and NYU, for example; Boston, Harvard and MIT; the Bay Area and UC-Berkeley and Stanford. This relationship is a defining feature of today’s economy.
Clearly that relationship works in some places. But it’s also clear that there are examples where it hasn’t. There’s an open question as to whether Ivies like Penn or Yale have made the same impact on Philadelphia and New Haven, respectively. That also applies to “Ivy Plus” schools like the University of Chicago and Northwestern in Chicago, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Washington University in St. Louis.
So I’ve always wondered about the “town-gown” relationship. Is this relationship crucial for urban transformation? Why does the relationship work in some cities, and come up short in others? Do private and public universities have different impacts on cities? Does size (of the institution) matter? Will a city lacking such a relationship always lag those that do?
I can explain through my own experience. I worked on two projects designed to engage universities in community revitalization. As a planner for the City of Chicago at the start of my career, I worked on the Mid-South Plan, which looked at the redevelopment of the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Bronzeville can be called the point of origin for Black Chicago; an influx of Black migrants from the South, seeking to escape Jim Crow and take on good-paying manufacturing jobs, poured into the city starting in the late 19th century. In short time the area became the starting point of the Black Belt, the limited area of the South Side where Blacks were forced to live. Overcrowding in Bronzeville later led to the deliberate containment policy that was public housing. Bronzeville went through a half-century long downward spiral before the city took an earnest look at how to revitalize the area in the early 1990’s.
The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), a small, mostly post-graduate institution on the South Side, played a role in the planning effort. Since its founding in 1940, IIT’s been a presence in Bronzeville. But for decades the school was disconnected from the surrounding community, so it wasn’t always viewed favorably by its mostly Black neighborhood. IIT was trying to figure out how to effectively engage with the Bronzeville neighborhood and address its needs, while also securing its own presence. That made community engagement tough at the time.
In the mid-1990’s I was hired by DePaul University to work as the project manager for a community/university partnership program. DePaul had been awarded a HUD grant known as the Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) Program, which was designed to “help colleges and universities apply their human, intellectual, and institutional resources to the challenge of revitalizing distressed communities.”
DePaul had established numerous relationships with organizations and institutions in Chicago’s West Humboldt Park neighborhood, about a 20-minute drive west of DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. West Humboldt Park and Lincoln Park could not be more different then, and now. West Humboldt Park was a West Side working-class community comprised of people working service and light manufacturing jobs, struggling to establish a foundation for revitalization. Lincoln Park was a North Side lakefront upper-middle class community comprised of people working management and professional jobs, with a commercial ecosystem that served its residents’ needs. Demographically, West Humboldt Park was a mix of Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican residents. Lincoln Park was largely White. All of this is still true today.
I had frustrations with the DePaul project and my role in it, mostly due to the old “philosophical differences” phrase. I saw the work of DePaul in West Humboldt Park as a new and innovative tool that would help achieve my mission as a planner, to revitalize distressed communities. It didn’t take long for me to see that the university’s primary focus was on establishing an academic service-learning arena (I won’t call it a laboratory, there were no experiments) that would fulfill two goals. First, it would offer students and faculty a new real-world training ground that could offer insight on the effectiveness of academic theories. But second and more importantly, DePaul saw the partnership as a way to expand its mission of teaching its students to have a commitment to community service and social justice.
A noble mission. But it’s not the same as community revitalization.
I saw an imbalance in the partnership. The university’s students and faculty gained a great deal, while the community was, well, used. Students and faculty gained valuable insight on the concerns of inner-city residents. They assumed the “we understand you” sentiment was enough to forge revitalization. The West Humboldt Park community, however, was looking for the economic connections that were unavailable to them – the business, investment, development networks that make universities, and all successful, thriving places, what they are.
From my perspective the networks that make a university like DePaul function were taken for granted. There was little inclusion.
The best partnerships tended to be the ones between a university and its surrounding neighborhood, particularly if the surrounding neighborhood was a struggling one. In those cases the university took a careful partner approach and gingerly entered into housing and economic development activities that supported the university and neighborhood. For example, Yale was instrumental in the creation of the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, which renovated homes, encouraged faculty and staff to buy homes in the community, and revitalized commercial corridors. The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), another Chicago COPC grantee, funneled its work in the surrounding Pilsen neighborhood through its Great Cities Institute. The university was able to achieve a complicated transformation of its surrounding neighborhood using community/university partnerships like the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative, bringing diverse groups together to create a shared development vision.
But more often, universities undertook projects in communities without a physical connection. That produced program successes that tended to look like some of the success story subtitles shown in the ten-year anniversary document HUD produced in 2004:
“University of Illinois at Springfield – Graduate Student Uses Classroom Learning to Establish
Neighborhood Association”
“Claremont Graduate University – California Resident Connects Neighbors to Community Resources”
“Robert Morris University – Undergraduate’s Compassion and Determination Give Hope to
Middle School Students”
“Mercer University – Former Public Housing Resident Becomes Neighborhood Advocate”
“University of North Carolina at Greensboro – Coach Uses Baseball to Teach Life Lessons to North Carolina Youth”
It’s a collection of laudable achievements by universities and individuals that build community capacity. But none of these directly lead to the kind of relationships and networks that get people educated, employed, and involved in establishing a stronger economic future for themselves and their community.
It takes decades – generations – for the benefits of metro-scale higher education/business/community partnerships to be realized, in places like the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, or Silicon Valley. It can take just as long for similar community-scale efforts to come to fruition, like at Yale and UIC. But it’s worth the effort if we want inclusive and equitable cities.