Urban Universities

Lots of articles yesterday on the positive impacts that urban universities have on their surroundings, including an award for the University of North Carolina and Otis White's April 1st column titled "City Planning 101".

Longer articles have been appearing in the big newspapers as well, particularly for major urban universities like Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. After years of poor town-gown relations between Yale University and New Haven, the university out of necessity was one of the firsdt to embark on a series of direct and indirect programs to revitalize its immediate surroundings, titled the "Yale-New Haven Initiative". Though the effectiveness, and intent of the initiative have been questioned, New Haven is finally benefitting from population influx and rising real estate prices.

This impact of Harvard University on Boston is also an ongoing topic in the Boston Globe, given the university's major plans for expansion into the Allston neighborhood in Boston. There is also a terrific article in the Gotham Gazette about the overall impact and state of universities in New York.

Columbia's Manhattanville expansion is particularly controversial given their desire to use New York City's powers of eminent domain to acquire properties for the university, a private entity. Articles have been appearing over the past year or so, including in the New York Times, with the seemingly ubiquitous Norman Siegel representing another New York neighborhood against the use of eminent domain.

The University of California at Berkeley, a hotbed of Sixties-protest, has recently found itself (again) on the defensive, this time against the City of Berkeley's opposition to their long-range expansion plan. A summary of the history of their plans for expansion by a Berkeley faculty member, and Oakland resident, appears here.

These university expansion plans also illuminate the particular role of universities within cities. As one of the oldest and most persistent institutions in Western society, urban universities physically concentrate the intellectual activity and institutionalized knowledge associated with the growth (and rationale) for cities.

Many universities and cities also highlight the role of the academic sector in local economic development. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges has a survey of economic impacts here, eight universities have documented their economic impact to Boston here, impact of the University of Texas system on Texas is reported here and here, and the celebrated University of California system is analyzed here.

(Unfortunately, I haven't found any economic impact studies not released by the public affairs offices of universities. However, before we get all excited about research bias, we have to ask ourselves who would actually be able study this issue if not for higher education).

The impact of universities to economic development can be broken down geographically and socially. At first glance, the benefits of research universities would appear to be their ability to attract national and private sector research funding to targeted local areas, and the spin-off benefits of these funds. Of course, the primary mission of universities has always been to produce highly educated individuals, and this is thought again to be a highly desirable feature to attract more young, highly educated professionals.

Universities themselves also exert significant impacts on the growth and development of cities. Columbia and NYU are among the largest landowners and employers in New York City, and have always been controversial neighbors, either recently or in the past.

Another interesting question would be the impact of universities to ex-urban or rural areas. I suspect that one could examine the development of areas like Davis, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; flourishing small cities all.