Universities and Neighborhoods

“Universities and Neighborhoods” is a subsection of the City, Land and The University Program. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (the Institute) launched its “The City, Land and The University Program” (the Program) five years ago. The Institute wanted to increase its focus on cities. Lack of significant leadership from the public sector in the rebuilding of most depressed urban areas, along with the long-term abandonment by private investors, led us to consider alternative urban institutions for leadership in this area. Universities perform multiple activities that affect it’s surroundings to varying degrees with processes and outcomes that can, at times, be highly contested. The impacts of these activities often differ in their geographical scope, affecting areas as immediate as the surrounding neighborhood or city to areas more remote like entire regions and the nation as a whole.

This relatively newly included subsection has taken the form of a workshop introduced in 2004 for community-based organizations (CBOs) entitled “Neighborhoods Working in the Shadows of Urban Universities". Representatives from over a dozen cities attended our workshop. At this workshop, representatives from CBOs—some were CDCs and other traditional community organizations who had a university as a neighbor while others were organizations that were formed specifically to confront university real estate expansion—gathered. The workshop provided an opportunity to understand the university’s logic in their real estate expansion and to hear from community groups who have successfully worked with their neighboring universities.