The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis

Case Studies and Analysis

David C. Perry, Wim Wiewel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317454090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Integrating topics in urban development, real estate, higher education administration, urban design, and campus landscape architecture, this is the first book to explore the role of the university as developer. Accessible and clearly written, and including contributions from authorities in a wide range of related areas, it offers a rich array of case studies and analyses that clarify the important roles that universities play in the growth and development of cities. The cases describe a host of university practices, community responses, and policy initiatives surrounding university real estate development. Through a careful blending of academic analysis and practical, hands-on administrative and political information, the book charts new ground in the study of the university and the city.

Part I

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Introduction

1

From Campus to City

The University as Developer

David C. Perry and Wim Wiewel

“Higher education, including the research complex … has become the most critical single feature of modern society.”

—Talcott Parsons, as quoted in Stefan Muthesius,
The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College, 2000

The University, Its Mission, and the City

Few would quarrel with the value of the university to society, and many would even join Talcott Parsons in his claim of the singular social importance of institutions of higher education. The university has long been one of Western civilization’s key institutions. Along with local government, the firm, and the church, among others, universities contribute in multiple ways to modern urban society (Van der Wusten 1998). The university is a significant source of received knowledge or wisdom, the primary site for the debate over change in the intellectual order, and an incubator of revolutions in science and technology. Just as important, the university is considered a center of culture, aesthetic direction, and the moral forces shaping the “civilized” society. Universities also contribute in important ways to the economic health and physical landscape of cities, serving as all but permanent fixtures of the urban economy and built environment.

Such contributions to social formation, however, have not left the university in an unambiguous position relative to its urban environment. Almost from the beginning, the relationship between the university and its surroundings has been as conflictive as it has been important—captured most commonly in the timeworn phrase of “town-gown” relations. In part this is understandable, since the university as a site of knowledge has often seen itself as something of an enclave, removed enough from the immediacy and demands of modern life to produce the knowledge and information with which to better understand society and the science and technical inventions that ultimately transform it. For some this meant that the purpose of the modern research university was to create a community of scholars removed from the “turmoil” of the city and free “from the distractions of modern civilization” (Graham 1898, as quoted in Bender 1998, 18). For others this meant an unresponsive, disconnected, and alienated institution with a decidedly antiurban bias. Especially in the United States, there has been an impulse to build campus environments (even in cities) with “an affinity with the purified, safe and calm life of the suburbs” (Bender 1998, 18).

This impulse has been tempered in return by a new, more modern, and equally historically grounded tradition that views the university in quite different terms: as a product of its relationship with the city and its urban surroundings, with a strong belief “in a university of, not simply in, the city. But that does not imply that it ought to be or can be the same thing as a city” (Bender 1998, 18). This call for a clarified understanding of the “university of the city” takes on a host of meanings. In a very real way the fundamental intellectual mission of the university cannot be understood outside its context. To subscribe to the view that the university is purely an “ivory tower” or “wholly self-contained” is both wrong and unrealistic because the lion’s share of the truth a university seeks to transmit, the knowledge it concerns itself with, is not of its making. It comes from outside the campus—from other institutions and other scholars. Even the knowledge produced by a university’s scholars is “not for their contemplation exclusively.… What is essential in a university—knowledge—must be drawn from and offered to students, teachers and investigators in other parts of the world. Intellectually, no university can be wholly self-contained” (Shils 1988, 210).

At the same time, while the prevailing model of university development has historically been the pastoral campus, university land development cannot be conducted in a “wholly self-contained” way anymore than the educational mission can. The urban university is an urban institution—not only in terms of the transmission of knowledge, but in many other ways as well. The “university of the city” (Bender 1998; Cisneros 1995) with a “land grant mission” (McDowell 2001; Crooks 1982) serving as an “engaged” institution (Kellogg Commission 1999; Harkavy and Puckett 1994; Maurrasse 2001) with “urban goals” (Klotsche 1966; Nash 1973; U.S. Congress House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs 1992; U.S. Congress House Committee on Education and Labor 1977; Grobman 1988) is a recurring theme of academic leadership and literature, especially in the late twentieth century.

This search for knowledge (and engagement), the production of knowledge, and the training of society occurs in large, complex, physically expanding, and economically important environments. The research group Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) reports that in 1996 there were well over 1,900 universities and colleges in the core of U.S. cities (2002, 7), and their combined budgets comprised more than 68 percent of the more than $200 billion spent annually by universities nationwide (NCES 2002, ch. 3, 3). The total in 1999–2000 constant dollars was $216.3 billion. Put another way, as of 1996 urban universities were spending about $136 billion on salaries, goods, and services, which is more than nine times what the federal government spends in cities on job and economic development (ICIC 2002, 7). Universities consistently rank among the top employers in metropolitan areas and, in some cases, they are a city’s top employer. Universities also are among the largest and most permanent sources of land and building ownership in the city—indeed it is estimated that, using original purchase price as a referent, urban colleges and universities at present own over $100 billion in fixed assets (current market value would be several times higher) (ICIC 2002, 8).

While the overall impact of universities on regional development is becoming better understood, their impact on central cities “remains relatively unexplored” (ICIC 2002, 6) and the role of the university in real estate development is equally underexplored (Pinck 1993; ICIC 2002; VerMeulen 1980; Wolfe 1986). Nowhere is the complex, often conflicted nature of the university as an urban institution more evident than in its real estate development practices. The claims of campus development and expansion are often practiced as, or at least perceived to be, decisions made in relative institutional isolation, mirroring the pastoral traditions of campus and ivory tower (Bender 1988; Muthesius 2000; Dober 1991, 2000). University developers acquire land and build structures that contribute to a campus, responsive to the core mission or the demands of the “ways of knowledge,” the disciplines, the sciences, and the new modes of discovery they require and the technologies they fuel (McDowell 2001). Universities find their main constituencies in their faculty, their students, and increasingly their alumni and donors. Their first development responses are those that meet the requirements such constituents have for the campus—what attracts good students and faculty and retains them and what donors will support (Dober 2000; Webber, chapter 4 in this volume).

Against such internal logic of development is an equally evident external logic. Because universities are among the largest landowners and employers in cities, as well as major consumers of private goods and public services, they have a host of external constituents. Both indirectly, in light of the institution’s educational mission, but quite directly and dramatically, in terms of the university’s physical location, economic relations, and political demands, these constituencies often assert every bit the same level of claims on the university as they do on the firm, the church, or public agencies in the city. Therefore the role of the urban university is an important and complex one—mixing the institutional demands of both academy and city.

The political, economic, intellectual, and ethical elements that make up the challenges and opportunities of real estate development comprise one of the university’s most important areas of institutional practice. This book serves as an initial exploration of such practice, offering a rich array of cases that provide an opportunity to understand significant elements of university administration, finance, community relations, and development, and also contribute to our understanding of urban institutions more generally, placing an emphasis on the undeniable importance of the roles universities play in the growth and development of the city. To write the cases, we have assembled scholars, academic leaders, university development experts, practitioners, real estate development specialists, and community leaders who use their varied experience and scholarship to describe a host of university practices, community responses, and policy initiatives that comprise much of contemporary university real estate development. Taken together their approach here is both contextual and evaluative, serving as one of the first efforts to treat university real estate development as “a new area of academic as well as applied inquiry” (Wiewel and Perry, chapter 17 in this volume).

The book sets out to contribute to this new area of academic and professional study in four ways. First, we seek to add to the general academic conversation on the place of the university in the city, from the perspective of what motivates the university to enter the urban real estate development process. More precisely, does the particular educational mission of the university and its obligations to students, faculty, and researchers, and the scholarship they seek, combine to require different or higher standards of institutional procedures and ethics in real estate deals?

Second, a major part of the book concentrates on how the university, through its land and building policies, embeds itself in (some critics might say “ignores”) the larger urban development process. Put another way, university real estate development has come to be perceived as an important part of the community development process. Thus a substantial part of this book is committed to a discussion of the ways university real estate practices engage such processes at key levels of urban spatial development, including the neighborhoods that surround the university, the development of the urban core or downtown business district, and larger city wide development strategies of which university-city real estate collaboration is meant to be a part.

A third purpose of this collection is to drill more deeply into the practices of university real estate development, using as a starting point the particular issues of real estate acquisition and development that universities face as they undertake different types of land and building deals. The chapters written to address these topics are meant to provide fine-grained assessments of decision making, financing, and community relations practices. While each of these sets of practices is important, if there is a “first practice” among them it is finance, and therefore special attention is paid to the different mechanisms universities use to fund their real estate transactions.

A fourth goal is to establish a critical or evaluative tradition within which to build a long-standing and reflective understanding of the university as developer. Therefore the book closes with chapters that set guidelines for institutional and practice-based evaluation of university real estate development. We use the rich combination of analysis and experience demonstrated by the contributors to this collection to provide a synthesis of best practices and lessons learned. The final chapters are meant to be more than capstones to this collection. We hope they will serve as an early assessment of a previously understudied area and a bridge to future academic analysis and professional understanding of universities as developers.

The Campus and the City: Neighborhood, Downtown, and Citywide Development

If there is some semblance of academic and professional tradition to be found in past university development practices, it is most likely in the scholarship and practice of campus design and planning. And if there is a single term that seems to capture the logic of university development practice, it was and remains the term “campus,” the Latin word for field. “Campus became common as an expression for an ensemble of buildings for higher education. Thus campus indicates primarily location. The term underlines the self-containedness of the institution and thus its separateness” (Muthesius 2000, 24). The source of this self-containedness was derived from the perceived nature of the intellectual mission of the institution and the “separateness” of the campus working to ensure the academic “community” or enclave in the service of that mission.

Historian Thomas Bender takes these notions of university as campus further. He suggests that in the all but universal adherence to the developmental principle of the campus, American universities, even the urban ones, came to embody the tradition of “Anglo American pastoralism”—where the academic mission is carried out in and around the “green” or the quad: a setting that links faculty and students to their respective disciplinary buildings and dorms, but keeps them unlinked and away from the city (Bender 1988). Thus the campus and its planning, argues Paul Turner (1984), is the thoroughly American tradition of university architecture and design, albeit a decidedly anti-urban one (as referenced by Bender 1988).

During the era of educational reform following World War II, the tradition of campus planning as the ideal form of university urban development became something of a “science.” Ironically what started as essentially a figment of American antiurbanism became the paradigm for postwar urban university development. Richard Dober, in his seminal 1963 book Campus Planning, describes how university campuses are built through “logical building increments,” or academic, housing, or administrative units, laid out in large relatively flat settings and of a scale to facilitate pedestrian-auto linkage. Above all this new campus, argues Dober, must be “green—providing relief from the communal life of the institution and removal from the stress of the general conditions of modern society” (Dober 1963, as quoted in Muthesius 2000, 26).

Writing more recently Dober (2000, xvi) continues to describe the ideal landscape of university development as a “green carpet upon which buildings are placed, or … articulated as a device to extend a building design concept into open space, with a garnish for an architectural feast.” As such the campus green remains, for university planners like Dober, a central feature of university land development. It serves as a signature element in the strategies to make colleges and universities better able to “attract and retain faculty and students, advance educational program and research programs, energize fund-raising appeals … demonstrate environmental concepts and ethics … and strengthen the campus as a community design asset” (Dober 2000, xviii).

It follows, therefore, that university development, informed by such ideals, could easily exacerbate historic town-gown conflicts, often running at odds with the broader urban and community development agendas of the city. This is certainly borne out in the first several chapters of this collection, which show how the development requirements of the modern urban campus are no longer served by a developmental celebration of traditional American pastoralism. The notion of campus is changing and the ways it is planned and built reflect new needs of the communities—both academic and urban—that study, work, or live in and otherwise use university-owned buildings and land.

There are many reasons for these changes. First, the campus tradition, built as it has been on a model of the university separate from its surroundings, created the potential for long-term, serious conflict between the university and its neighbors. It is not uncommon to hear communities angrily critique universities for their imperious, unresponsive development policies and in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Campus and the City: Neighborhood, Downtown, and Citywide Development
• Part III University Development Practices: Acquisition, Finance, Development, and the Deal
• Part IV Lessons Learned
• About the Editors and Contributors
• About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
• Index