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Old-timers in Detroit like to recall the 1950s and ’60s as a Golden Age of urban planning. Under Charles Blessing, the city’s charismatic head planner from 1953 to 1977, Detroit carried out a series of ambitious attempts to reshape its urban landscape. Sweeping aside a century’s worth of tenements and small commercial structures, it created the Mies van der Rohe–designed Lafayette Park residential development just east of downtown, a light industrial park west of downtown, and block after block of low-rise moderate-income housing on the north side. Edward Hustoles, a retired veteran planner of those years, recalls how Blessing enjoyed such status as Detroit’s visionary that over lunch at a nice restaurant he would sketch his plans all over the tablecloth; if a server complained, Blessing would roll it up and tell her to put it on his bill.
Times change. Blessing retired in the 1970s, and by then Detroit was mired in its long-agonizing slide into Rust Belt ruin. The twin scourges of deindustrialization and suburban sprawl, which hurt so many cities in the American heartland, hit Detroit particularly hard. Numerous factories, so modern when they were built in the early 20th century, looked obsolete by the 1950s and ’60s, and were mostly abandoned by the end of the 1980s. The new car-enabled culture of suburbia, aided and abetted by federal highway building and other measures, encouraged hundreds of thousands of residents to flee the city for Birmingham, Troy, and other outlying communities. The exodus was hastened by fraught race relations, which grew especially toxic after the 1967 civil disturbances. Without inhabitants, Detroit’s vast stock of small wood-frame worker housing moldered; arson, crack, metal stripping, blight, and other ills corroded entire neighborhoods, forcing the city to raze block after block of homes in the 1990s and 2000s—a trend accelerated by the 2007–2008 real estate crisis, which compounded a vicious cycle of property tax delinquency and foreclosure, decimating what remained of Detroit’s housing market. Today, the best estimates suggest that at least 24 square miles of Detroit’s 139-square-mile land area are empty, and another six to nine square miles have unoccupied buildings that need to come down. Add in municipal parks that the city no longer maintains and abandoned rights-of-way like old railroad lines, and 25 percent of Detroit—an area larger than Manhattan—is vacant.
By the 1990s, urban planning had become obsolescent as a focus and a guide. A series of mayors tended to latch onto whatever showcase projects came along—the much-maligned Renaissance Center in the 1970s, or casino gaming in the late 1990s. Detroit’s municipal planning department found a new role administering federal community development block grants, and, in recent years, the department had more accountants than planners. But in 2010, then-Mayor David Bing initiated a strategic attempt to address the problem of widespread vacancy and the burden it placed on municipal services and budgets. That effort culminated in 2013 with the publication of Detroit Future City, the 354-page comprehensive framework for how Detroit might strengthen and regrow its troubled neighborhoods and repurpose its empty lots and buildings over the coming decades. Advocating widespread “greening” strategies—including “productive landscapes” that would put vacant land to new use through reforestation, rainwater retention ponds, the installation of solar panels, and food production—Detroit Future City won praise as a visionary new way to think about older industrial cities and to include ordinary citizens in the conversation about their future. “In the annals of civic engagement and community planning, Detroit Future City is probably the most extensive community outreach and planning exercise that I’ve ever encountered,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Origins and Essence
By 2010, three years before Detroit would file the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the population had dwindled to 700,000 from its peak of 1.85 million in 1950. Then-Mayor David Bing needed to realign city services to account for the diminished tax base and thinning of the urban streetscape. His initial suggestion to reporters that he would move the few remaining inhabitants out of some of Detroit’s most abandoned “ghost” neighborhoods drew blistering comparisons to the urban renewal projects of the past and even hoots of “ethnic cleansing”; the idea was quickly shelved. Also that year, the mayor and top aides staged a series of community meetings called Detroit Works to elicit a dialogue with citizens about the need to rethink how the city should operate in the future. But residents had other ideas. The meetings quickly devolved into chaotic complaint sessions where hundreds of residents demanded better street lights, police protection, and other city services fast.
McCarthy, who was then with the Ford Foundation and a supporter of Detroit’s revitalization efforts, said leaders should have known better. “When you bring normal citizens into the planning process, they enter the exercise as if it’s a public meeting and the way to be heard is to shout the loudest,” he said. “If you’re sincere about civic engagement, you have to take the time to train citizens to be planners. You have to devote a significant amount of time and attention to get people to understand that planning is about making difficult decisions in a constrained environment.”
With funding from the Kresge Foundation and other sources, the city regrouped and hired teams of consultants, including nationally respected planning staffers such as Project Director Toni L. Griffin, professor and director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Under Griffin’s leadership, they began to map out the document that would become Detroit Future City.
The group took pains to avoid the word “plan” when they presented it to the public. Unlike a conventional master plan, which basically creates a map of what uses will go where before the private sector comes in to fill it out with development, Detroit Future City is a strategic framework for thinking about different neighborhood types and how each might evolve given existing trends.
“We did not want to leave the city with static illustrative pictures of what their city could look like,” Griffin says. “There were already lots of those around. We wanted to leave the city with a tool that would enable people to manage change, because as you know Detroit is still very much in flux in terms of its governance, fiscal structures, city services, population loss, and ever-changing composition of land vacancy.”
The framework had to enable decision makers to act as that change was occurring over various periods of time. “It offers different decision-making structures that allow someone to say, if this is your condition today, here are the kinds of options you might think about to move that condition from A to B,” Griffin says. To simplify: If a neighborhood is showing a significant and growing level of vacancy but still retaining some useable housing and commercial stock, the vacant land there could be converted to food production or to a solar panel field to power local businesses. But a neighborhood with little vacancy and with much higher levels of density might plan infill development for its few vacant lots. Rather than suggesting that the corner of Woodward Avenue and 7 Mile Road ought to get a shopping center, the framework offers a series of examples of what might take place given certain neighborhood typologies. The mantra became “every neighborhood has a future, just not the same future.”
Detroit Future City’s greening strategies were particularly important and drew the most attention because of the huge amount of vacant land where development is not a realistic option and probably won’t be for many years to come; perhaps one-third of the entire city cries out for some new purpose and use. The more vacant spots on the map could be rendered productive by the installation of fields of energy-producing solar panels, reforestation, farming, or “blue infrastructure,” such as rainwater retention ponds, bioswales, and canals that provide water for agriculture and that redirect rainwater and snowmelt away from Detroit’s already overburdened combined sewer system. Almost all these uses presumably would be private endeavors but would require city permitting and perhaps other assistance, including zoning changes or partnerships with various philanthropic or nonprofit groups. “You need to have a greening strategy, so you can use this land in ways that, at a minimum, don’t drag down existing populated areas and, at a maximum, enhance the quality of life, economic productivity, and environmental quality for the people of Detroit,” says Alan Mallach, a Detroit Future City consultant, nonresident fellow of the Brookings Institution, and author of Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities, published by the Lincoln Institute.
But the plan also envisions significantly greater population densities in those areas of Detroit already undergoing a rebirth, such as the Greater Downtown area, where young professionals have sparked a recent residential boom and where companies led by Quicken Loans, which moved downtown in 2010, have filled up previously vacant office towers. It suggests that Detroit’s existing hospital and manufacturing corridors could and should see concentrated new investment to beef up job training opportunities and new residential and retail development in those nodes. Key employment districts could be linked by new public transit options, such as the M-1 Rail streetcar line now under construction along Woodward Avenue, the city’s main street, thanks to public-private financing. Construction began in mid-2014 on the $140-million, 3.3-mile line, which will connect downtown from Jefferson Avenue to the city’s New Center area, another hub of activity, running through the rapidly revitalizing Midtown district. The line is expected to be finished in late 2016. If voters approve a new property tax millage expected to be on the ballot in 2016, M-1 could be followed by a regionwide bus rapid transit system to be built out over the next several years.
Mallach describes Detroit Future City “as a reality check against what’s actually happening, against how you’re spending your money, where you’re making your investments, what you’re prioritizing, and so forth.”
“Detroit Future City offers a menu,” he adds. “It doesn’t say this site should become an urban farm; it lays out the options.”
Civic Engagement
Deciding what would happen where would be left to the political process—with neighbors, city leaders, and other stakeholders all taking part. Thus, public input would be critical to success.
In 2012, the Detroit Future City team hired Dan Pitera, a professor at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) School of Architecture, to design a new and better civic engagement strategy to harness and direct residents’ desire for change. Efforts ranged from informal chat sessions at a “roaming table,” designed by UDM architecture students and set up at various locations in town, to a series of meetings at community centers, where 100,000 residents engaged in discussions that informed the urban rehabilitation.
During this planning stage in 2012 and early 2013, a new walk-in office in the Eastern Market district allowed residents to meet staffers, see plans, take surveys, and the like. Those working at the office included staffers from UDM’s Detroit Collaborative Design Center, directed by Pitera, and the nonprofit Community Legal Resources. Pitera’s group also created a mobile phone app to encourage community involvement. And the team created 25 color posters keyed to city issues, such as vacant land or community gardens, for distribution by the thousands throughout the city.
During one Saturday morning meeting in 2012 at the Detroit Rescue Mission, some 50 residents got a peek at what various neighborhoods might become depending on current conditions and residents’ desires. Some of the attendees gave positive reviews. “The conversation is just what we need to get back to the real issues,” said Phillis Judkins, 65, of the North End district. And Larry Roberts, 70, who lives in Detroit’s Indian Village neighborhood, said the 2012 public meetings were more productive than the somewhat chaotic mass meetings Detroit Works held in the fall of 2010. “Today it looks like there are people with ideas that can move forward,” he said.
Some skepticism remained, of course, about how many of the good ideas would become policy in the cash-strapped city, and how many might ever be carried out. “If the city government buys into this plan and communicates to us what they’re going to do, I think it will work out all right,” Roberts said.
Under current Mayor Mike Duggan, who took office in 2014, a roster of neighborhood offices have opened to deal more closely with citizens and their concerns than previous administrations had done. The level of community involvement to date has been evidence that Detroiters have not given up on their neighborhoods, even in the hardest hit areas.
Rubber Hits the Road
Happily, concerns that Detroit Future City would sit on the shelf gathering dust like so many previous documents in Detroit seem unfounded. With Kresge’s financial backing and leadership, the Detroit Future City (DFC) Implementation Office was established as a nonprofit charged with realizing the plan’s visions and suggestions. Dan Kinkead, an architect who helped to write Detroit Future City, was appointed director of projects. The group now has a fixed location in Detroit’s New Center district and a staff of about 12, including staffers available through various fellowship programs underway in the city. Kenneth Cockrel, a former president of the Detroit City Council who briefly served as interim mayor after then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick resigned in disgrace in 2008, was hired at the end of 2013 to be director of the implementation office.
In early 2015, the implementation office had multiple pilot projects underway in partnership with other organizations. These include:
Solar Fields. Working with Focus: HOPE, a nonprofit job training facility in the city, and a small start-up, the DFC team is planning to cover some 15 acres of vacant land with solar panels. Kinkead estimates that the field could produce five megawatts of energy—enough to power several hundred houses. Planners hope to start the project this year or next, but it was unclear how many people it might employ.
Rainwater Retention Ponds. On Detroit’s east side, the DFC staff is considering the creation of a series of rainwater retention ponds in a residential neighborhood to keep rainwater out of the sewer system. The neighborhood, known as Jefferson Village, had been targeted for new single-family housing some 15 years ago, but that project stalled for lack of funding, leaving dozens of vacant lots and little demand for them. So with funding from the local Erb Foundation, and consulting with the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, the DFC team is targeting several dozen vacant lots for the treatment. They envision that nearby homeowners could see a rate reduction on their water bills, because the department will no longer have to build and maintain as much big-pipe infrastructure to clean up rainwater that mixes in with wastewater. If the effort proved successful, they would expand it citywide.
Roadside carbon buffers. With the nonprofit Greening of Detroit tree-planting organization, one of DFC’s recommendations—to plant trees as carbon buffers alongside major roads and highways—saw one of the city’s largest-ever tree-planting blitzes in late 2014 on Detroit’s west side near the Southfield Freeway, a major north-south connector. Volunteers planted some 300 trees in one day along a few blocks. When mature, they will absorb at least some of the carbon emissions from the freeway.
Trish Hubbell, a spokesperson for the Greening of Detroit, said that partnering with the DFC implementation team on such efforts raises the visibility of each project, which in turn helps with fundraising. And the DFC team brings a wealth of knowledge on land use issues to any effort.
“Their biggest value is that they have the framework, and so they help steer where things go,” Hubbell said. “The framework adds value to all the opportunities out there.”
The Urban Farming Controversy
One controversial land use the office has championed stems from a trend Detroit is already well-known for—urban agriculture. Over the past 15 years, Detroit has seen well over 1,000 small community gardens started, including such nationally recognized projects as Earthworks and D-Town Farm, each of which covers a few acres. But currently volunteers perform almost all the farming activity, and the food is consumed by neighbors, donated to food banks, or in a few cases sold at local farmers markets. Detroit has undertaken a lively debate in recent years over the possibility of expanding into large-scale for-profit agriculture. Projects like Hantz Farms and RecoveryPark have mapped ambitious plans to convert hundreds of acres to food production. But each effort remains relatively small scale at the moment, as the debate on the wisdom of large-scale farming continues.
Nevertheless, the DFC team seems committed to much greater food production inside the city, both on vacant land and in abandoned factories where hydroponic farming could take place. The DFC team, for example, is working with the RecoveryPark effort to plan a rainwater retention system to help water crops.
At the very least, farming inside the city could help some local food entrepreneurs grow their businesses, create some jobs, and strengthen the tax base, if only on a modest scale. Food production also helps knit communities together around a purposeful activity, raises nutrition awareness, and puts blighted vacant lots and factories to a productive new use. “Detroit has the opportunity to be the first globally food-secure city,” Kinkead said.
But city officials have yet to sign off on large-scale for-profit farming, fearing that nuisance problems including dust, noise, and odors, will get out of hand. Others question whether the tough economics of farming—back-breaking labor performed mostly by minimum-wage migrants—would ever produce the sort of revenue and jobs to justify the effort. McCarthy remains one of the skeptics. “I thought it was a bad idea to try to grow food,” he says. “The economics just aren’t there; the costs are prohibitive, given the fact that you don’t have to drive that far to get out into perfectly good farmland outside Detroit at one tenth the cost.” So the debate continues, with the DFC implementation team working toward greater use of Detroit’s vacant land for food production.
Consensus Building
Rather than ignoring Detroit Future City as the product of a previous administration, Mayor Duggan has publicly embraced it as his guide. His top aide for jobs and the economy refers to his well-worn copy of Detroit Future City as his “Bible” for reshaping the city.
Jean Redfield, CEO of NextEnergy, a Detroit nonprofit working toward a sustainable energy future for the city, keeps a copy of Detroit Future City on her desk. “I use it a lot to go back to specific language they use to talk about specific options,” she said. “I use some of the maps and statistics pretty regularly.” And NextEnergy teams up with the DFC implementation team in planning a variety of green-and-blue infrastructure projects. “Our paths cross pretty often,” she said. “Whenever there’s a Department of Energy or City of Detroit question or challenge around land use, energy infrastructure, street lighting, or solar projects, we’re often working side by side with the folks there.”
As mentioned, the implementation team acts more as a lead advisor to other agencies, such as Greening of Detroit or the city’s Water & Sewerage Department, than as a primary actor. DFC Implementation Director Kenneth Cockrel calls the team a “nongovernmental planning agency.” He explains, “We inform decision making, but we are not decisions makers. Ultimately, what’s in the framework is going to be implemented by the mayor and by city council if they so choose to buy into it. They’re the ones who are going to drive implementation.”
Continuing, Cockrel likens the implementation of Detroit Future City “to what happens when a book gets made into a movie. You don’t film the book word for word and page for page. Some stuff gets left out, other stuff winds up on screen. I think that’s ultimately probably going to be the approach that the Duggan administration will take.”
Like any new organization, the DFC team continues to refine its role and search for where it can contribute most. Kinkead agrees their role may best be captured in a paraphrase of the old BASF corporate slogan: the DFC team doesn’t do a lot of the innovative projects in Detroit; it just makes a lot of those projects better.
“We exist in a squishy world,” Kinkead says. “It’s a different kind of ballgame, but our ability to help others is how we do what we do.”
In early 2015, it seemed clear that many of the innovative ideas at the heart of Detroit Future City—greening strategies, energy production, trees as carbon buffers, new development targeted toward already dense districts—ideas that seemed far-fetched even in 2010, when then-Mayor Bing launched his Detroit Works effort, now approach mainstream status.
“Now, it’s not just the environmentalists or the climate change folk talking about carbon forests; it’s residents and the executive directors of community development corporations,” Griffin says. “Business leaders and philanthropists are talking about the importance of this. A broader spectrum of constituents talking about issues that aren’t necessarily central to their wheelhouse is a very important outcome of the work.”
Perhaps just as important is the widespread realization that Detroit needs to deliver municipal services in a different way, given the realities of the city’s financial woes and population loss. The city successfully emerged from bankruptcy in late 2014, but at best that gave Detroit some breathing room to begin to grow again. If and when growth resumes, the city has to guide it more smartly than in past periods of expansion, when development sprawled across the landscape in haphazard fashion.
The Road Ahead
One reason why the city and its people were ready for a document like Detroit Future City was the deep understanding that deindustrialization and suburban sprawl had led to Detroit’s problems. “Residents began to understand that they were effectively subsidizing the sprawl and disinvestment. They began to think about ways to change these systems to be more efficient,” Griffin says.
As this article was being prepared for publication, Detroit took another big step toward revitalizing its long-dormant planning activities. Mayor Duggan announced that he had recruited Maurice Cox—the highly regarded director of the Tulane City Center, a community-based design resource center for New Orleans, and associate dean for Community Engagement at the Tulane University School of Architecture—to serve as Detroit’s new director of planning. In New Orleans, Cox facilitates a wide range of partnerships among Tulane University, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and the City of New Orleans. In Detroit, among other activities, he will help turn some of Detroit Future City’s general framework into specific planning recommendations.
If innovative planning is back in style, as it appears to be, it’s more decentralized, less focused on big projects, and more attuned to how conditions on the ground might demand different solutions in each neighborhood. And the number of voices heard in planning discussions is greater than ever before. Perhaps Detroit Future City’s final and most important contribution is that it has empowered neighborhoods and citizens as equal partners with high-level professional planners in deciding the future direction of the city.
Indeed, Detroit Future City launched a new age of planning, and it will look little or nothing like that of Blessing’s era. “Planning has certainly returned, but it’s fundamentally different from how it was 50 years ago,” says Kinkead. “In the 1950s and ’60s, the city’s broader planning objectives were often manifest from a single municipal government elite.”
“To move the city forward it takes everybody,” Kinkead says. “It’s not just Detroit Future City. It’s not just the government. It’s not just the business sector. It’s everybody working together.”
John Gallagher covers urban development issues for the Detroit Free Press. His books Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City and Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention are available from Wayne State University Press.
References
Detroit Future City. 2012. Detroit Future City: 2012 Detroit Strategic Framework Plan. Detroit, MI: Inland Press.
Mallach, Alan and Lavea Brachman. 2013. Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Skidmore, Mark. 2014. “Will a Greenbelt Help to Shrink Detroit’s Wasteland?” Land Lines 26 (4): 8–17.
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Boulder, Colorado, has developed a national reputation for having dealt creatively with growth management issues. The city has developed a 27,000-acre greenbelt, a system for controlling the rate of population growth by limiting building permits, and a defined urban growth boundary managed in cooperation with Boulder County. Boulder’s approach to urban growth boundaries, called the service area concept, offers important lessons for controlling sprawl, preserving rural land uses outside the city, and extending urban services in a rational manner.
Located 27 miles northwest of Denver at the base of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder is a home-rule city of approximately 96,000 people. It is the Boulder County seat, the home of the University of Colorado, and a regional employment center with approximately 86,000 jobs. Its strong economy is founded on the university, federal laboratories, regional and local retail, and a dynamic industrial sector concentrated in the high tech industry and business services.
Colorado has no statewide, mandated planning program. Statutory and home-rule cities and counties are granted land use planning and regulatory powers directly by the state. The Denver Regional Council of Governments engages in general planning, clearinghouse, and federal funding allocation activities, but there is no real, effective regional planning effort. As a result, sprawling development, undifferentiated between cities and unincorporated areas of counties, is typical along most of Colorado’s Front Range.
In the decade of the 1950s, Boulder’s population grew from 25,000 to 37,000 and during the 1960s it grew by a whopping 29,000 to reach 66,000. Some initial efforts to manage this growth included the “Blue Line,” a citizen-initiated amendment to Boulder’s charter in 1959 that restricted the extension of city water service above an elevation of 5,750 feet. It was later extended by ordinance to sewer service. While a few exceptions have been granted at the ballot box, the effect of this measure was to limit the city from extending water service to properties along the mountain backdrop. Property owners can still develop in the county, but at much lower densities than is typical in the city and only with individual water and septic systems.
Another important growth management program began in 1967, when Boulder became the first city in the United States to pass a tax specifically dedicated to preserve open space. This open space system forms the outer extent of the Boulder Valley, a joint planning area between the city and county.
Boulder’s Service Area Concept
A concern that unwanted development was continuing to take place outside city limits in the county, sometimes with city water and sewer service, led to the implementation of Boulder’s urban growth boundary. In 1970 the city and county adopted a joint comprehensive plan that defined the intended geographic extent of city expansion into the plains. This plan was further refined in 1978 to limit the city from extending water and sewer services outside city service area boundaries and to limit the county from approving new subdivisions that would need “urban” levels of services and facilities.
What specifically does the service area boundary do? It defines that part of the Boulder Valley planning area where the City of Boulder either already provides a full range of urban services to annexed properties or will provide services upon annexation. Land outside the service area boundary remains in the county at rural densities until the city and county jointly agree to bring the property into the service area. Land can also be “moved” out of the service area.
The 1978 plan, thus, protected the city against development just outside its boundaries that would put demands on city services without the ability to collect taxes to finance those services. It was also aimed at controlling sprawl, protecting sensitive environmental areas and rural land uses, and planning, financing and providing urban services in a more rational way. By adopting the plan through an intergovernmental agreement, both the city and county gained better control over urban development and service provision, while accomplishing many other conservation objectives. This approach owes much to the phased growth control ordinance pioneered in 1969 by the Township of Ramapo, New York.
What Are the Benefits?
What Are the Pitfalls?
Is that good or bad? On the good side, it has allowed Boulder to determine its own ideal city size, with consideration of how much congestion is tolerable, what sized city leads to a high quality of life, and what is sustainable over time. On the bad size, it holds Boulder back from capturing some of the benefits that additional development could bring, such as more affordable housing and less dependence on the automobile by building mixed use, transit-oriented neighborhood centers.
There is no real ending to this story. Land use planning is a major fixation for Boulder, and these issues are continuously analyzed, discussed, and often hotly debated. Nevertheless, Boulder has maintained a central vision of a compact city with a clear identity in the midst of a rural area. The growth management techniques used in Boulder may vary from those used by other cities, and they may be changed from time to time to meet local conditions, but the vision has remained intact.
Peter Pollock, AICP, is the director of the Community Planning Division for the City of Boulder, Colorado. This year he is a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute. This article is based in part on his presentation of the Fourth Annual David R. Fullmer Lecture, “Tools and Techniques for Managing Growth in the Boulder Region,” at the Institute in October 1997.
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Spatial segregation is a feature of metropolises from San Diego to Boston, from Santiago to Cape Town, from Belfast to Bangalore. In some places the segregation is associated primarily with racial groups, in other places, ethnicity or religion, while in still other places, income status. In our experiences with the Americas, we find that international comparative research allows researchers and policy analysts to see both unique and shared characteristics in sharp relief. For example, in Latin America, the public debate around urban spatial segregation typically focuses on socioeconomic issues, whereas in the U.S. and many developed countries the debate centers more on racial or ethnic disparities.
Residential segregation also has different meanings and consequences depending on the specific form and structure of the metropolis, as well as the cultural and historical context. In North America, social and ethnic minorities tend to be segregated in less desirable inner-city locales while the upper- and middle-class majority disperses into small, socially homogeneous urban neighborhoods or suburbs across the metropolis. By contrast, in Latin American cities it is the elite minority that tends to concentrate in one area of the city.
The Forces
The forces that contribute to spatial segregation are many and varied. The apartheid laws of South Africa were one extreme case of large-scale, government-sanctioned spatial segregation. Other cases have garnered less international attention, such as the Brazilian government’s destruction of favelas in the 1960s, when the poor inhabitants were removed to other segregated locations. On a smaller scale, in Santiago, Chile, between 1979 and 1985 during the Pinochet regime, more than 2,000 low-income families were evicted from high- and middle-income residential areas with the stated objective of creating neighborhoods that were uniform by socioeconomic group.
While government evictions and legal frameworks are explicit mechanisms for creating urban spatial segregation, more subtle mechanisms also have been used to create or enforce spatial segregation. In Colombia, the contribución de valorización (a kind of betterment charge) was imposed on inhabitants of an informal settlement in Bogotá located on the edge of a new circumferential highway. Officials knew the charge was higher than most inhabitants could afford to pay and would likely lead them to “choose” relocation. By setting land use standards that the poor could not meet, the government virtually forced them toward the informal, peripheral areas. The U.S. is no stranger to such mechanisms to create segregated housing markets. For example, some real estate agents shun racial and ethnic minorities or persons from lower social classes who do not fit their target markets, and many small landlords rely on informal networks to find the kinds of tenants they prefer.
Voluntary segregation has become a new force, with the proliferation of gated communities in both northern and southern hemispheres. This trend seems to have several motivations, including both supply and demand factors. On the demand side, residents might be attracted to the perception of security or a new lifestyle. On the supply side, builders and developers find tremendous profitability with the large-scale internalization of externalities in these highly controlled developments.
The complexity that stems from the combination of coercive and voluntary segregation leads us to a deeper question: What is the relationship between social differences and spatial segregation? It is commonly assumed that the former are “reflected” in the latter. Social groups sometimes resort to segregation in order to fortify their weak or blurred identity, as in the case of emerging middle-income groups or immigrant communities in search of social recognition. To a great extent, the post-war suburbanization process in U.S. cities can be interpreted as a means of homogeneous sorting to strengthen social identity.
The Consequences
In the U.S., spatial segregation is a serious policy issue because of the complex interactions between land and housing markets on the one hand, and their connection to local revenues and the distribution and quality of local services on the other hand. Disparities in school quality may be one of the more dramatic examples of the variations in public services between places.
The combination of residential segregation by class and by racial or ethnic groups and the systematically uneven spatial distribution of quality schools results in poor inner-city enclaves where children attend substandard schools, which in turn limits their life chances. Other services, such as access to transportation and health care, also vary spatially, as do such measurable factors as air quality and neighborhood infrastructure.
In other countries, spatial segregation of the poor often occurs within informal settlements. These areas once were viewed as aberrations, but scholars increasingly understand informality as a result of the normal functioning of land and housing markets, not as part of a duality of formal versus informal economies. In this view, illegal, irregular, informal, or clandestine activities to access and occupy urban land are the way that the market provides housing for poor people. Nevertheless, these arrangements are not always “chosen” for their low price or relative conveniences, but rather because they are one of an extremely limited set of choices available to the poor.
Traditional segregation patterns in Latin American cities are changing due to the proliferation of new gated communities for expanding high- and middle-income groups and the emergence of shopping centers and office complexes in more “modern” areas beyond the former urban enclaves. In São Paulo, Santiago, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, to name a few of the biggest and most dynamic cities, these developments are appearing even next to lower-income areas. Segregation of uses and access is becoming more intense, making the growing social inequalities of the last decades more apparent. Yet, at the same time, these changes in the patterns of segregation are reducing physical distances among socioeconomic groups, and are bringing “modern” commercial facilities and improved public spaces closer to the poor.
The consequences of segregation are probably changing due to this reduction in its geographical scale. Some of the negative effects of large-scale segregation of the poor (i.e., their agglomeration in the periphery of the cities) could be fading in this new, more diverse urban landscape. Recent empirical studies carried out in Santiago support this contention.
Policy Responses
Spatial segregation is both a reflection of the existing social structure and a mechanism to enforce that structure, thus raising the question of how and when segregation should be addressed. Is the problem in the U.S. context that poor minority children live among others of the same income and racial group, or is it that by living in poor, segregated areas the children’s life opportunities are limited because of their inaccessibility to good schools? Is the answer to improve the schools, to integrate the neighborhood, or to initiate a combination of these and other responses? In the context of developing countries, is the problem of informal settlements that they are often dangerous (due to risky environmental conditions or street violence) or that the residents are isolated from good jobs, transit and other services? Is the answer to reduce or eliminate the danger, to improve transit, to bring jobs to the neighborhood, or to try all of these programs?
We need to improve our understanding of the social problems in these segregated areas in order to adequately design and implement appropriate policy responses that are necessarily multidimensional. Should change come in the form of corrective programs (e.g., regularization or upgrading of informal settlements) or more fundamental policies that would involve the massive provision of serviced land at affordable prices? One “corrective” option contrasts the informalization of formal arrangements (e.g., deregulation) with the formalization of the informal (e.g., the redefinition of zoning codes or the regularization of alternative tenure systems).
A more fundamental solution would be either piecemeal implementation or mandatory designation of social housing developments in high-income areas. A different sort of tool is to open up decision making around the allocation of public investment, as in the successful orçamento participativo process used in the municipality of Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the budget is determined with extensive public participation. Other responses could address the radical upgrading of existing low-income peripheral settlements, more extensive use of linkage fees, or the elimination of land markets altogether, as was done in Cuba. However, we need more information regarding the efficacy of these varied programs and tools, and careful analysis of the necessary conditions to increase the chances of success.
Globalization has fostered the movement of labor and capital, bringing both the positive and negative experiences of developed and developing countries closer together. Immigrants to the U.S., particularly undocumented ones, tend to settle in urban enclaves, but their lack of legal status reverberates beyond those settlements. Access to jobs and credit is limited, which in turn restricts the immigrants’ mobility and reinforces existing spatial segregation.
On the other hand, as U.S. financial and real estate corporations extend their operations overseas, they introduce U.S. protocols, conventions, expectations and ways of operating. The exportation of such U.S. norms to developing countries may lead to new patterns of geographic discrimination (e.g., redlining) by race and/or ethnic group, where such practices previously were less explicit.
We know from past research and experience that segregation can increase land revenues for developers and landowners. We also know that the profitability of housing development is dependent upon public investments in roads, facilities and services. At the same time, we acknowledge that segregation has both negative and positive impacts on city life, ranging from social exclusion that makes life harder for the poor to strengthened social and cultural identities that contribute to the city’s diversity and vitality.
The face of segregation varies both within and between metropolises. However, comparative international work has demonstrated that there are important trends of convergence between U.S. and Latin American cities. We have much more to understand regarding the effect of interacting land and housing markets and the regulatory structure on spatial segregation and the life chances of urban residents.
Rosalind Greenstein is senior fellow and director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Land Markets. Francisco Sabatini is assistant professor in the Institute of Urban Studies at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. Martim Smolka is senior fellow and director of the Lincoln Institute’s Program in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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The proliferation of informal and illegal forms of access to urban land and housing has been one of the main consequences of the processes of social exclusion and spatial segregation that have characterized intensive urban growth in developing countries. Given the absence of adequate housing policies and the failure of the land market to offer sufficient, suitable and accessible housing options, millions of urban poor have to create their own shelter, either by invading private or public land or by buying land illegally and constructing their own housing. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of many researchers, policy makers and others worried about the grave socioeconomic, environmental and political implications for the urban poor and society at large.
Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is one of the most influential contemporary ideologues addressing this complex issue. His ideas and proposals regarding large-scale regularization programs, most recently presented in his book, The Mystery of Capital, have received extensive media coverage and have raised the level of public debate. His influence can be measured by the fact that an increasing number of countries and cities, in Latin America and elsewhere, have introduced regularization policies based on his ideas, and these programs have already had a significant impact on international and institutional approaches to property reform and good governance. In many countries, politicians who were never particularly interested in urban development concerns have now become vigorous defenders of de Soto’s ideas. Why?
A Review of Urban Settlement Trends
Before addressing de Soto’s work directly, a brief summary of the current situation is in order. In Latin America, the urbanization process has been especially significant: 380 million people, some 75 percent of the total population, lived in urban areas in 2000, making it the most urbanized region in the world. While the globalization of urban land markets has intensified in Latin America, the region has also seen poverty escalate. It is estimated that between 40 and 80 percent of the population lives illegally because they can neither afford nor gain legal access to land near employment centers. As a result, illegal tenure arrangements have become the main form of urban land development.
The violent evictions and forced removals of the 1970s have been gradually replaced by a relative tolerance of illegal occupations, culminating in some cases with the official recognition of such settlements. Responding to growing social mobilization, public administrators and policy makers in several countries have struggled to formulate regularization programs aimed at both upgrading informal areas and recognizing the land and housing rights of the dwellers, thus legalizing their status.
Most land tenure regularization programs have been structured around two intertwined objectives: to recognize security of tenure and to promote the sociospatial integration of informal communities within the broader urban structure and society. The definition of what constitutes security of tenure has varied in both theory and practice. The UN Global Campaign for Securing Tenure for the Urban Poor, for example, seeks to protect dwellers against eviction and achieve other basic objectives, such as contributing to sustainable livelihoods; improving access to basic services; securing urban citizenship; producing certainty and incentives for investment; mobilizing disparate communities; and empowering women.
Generally speaking, regularization programs in Latin America have been more successful in upgrading settlements through public investments in urban infrastructure and service provision than in legalization programs. The definition of the nature of the rights to be attributed to dwellers has varied greatly, ranging from titles (such as freehold and leasehold) to contracts (such as social rent and other rental mechanisms) and precarious administrative permits (such as temporary licenses and certificates of occupancy). Experiences based on the transfer of individual freehold titles have been largely unsuccessful, given the many existing legal, technical and financial obstacles.
de Soto’s Contributions to the Debate
Although he has claimed that he initiated the debate, de Soto instead has made an undeniably important contribution to a long-standing discussion of the need to confront the phenomenon of urban informality and illegality through public policies aimed at legalizing informal settlements and other extralegal economic activities. Since the 1970s, this debate increasingly has involved planners and policy makers, but de Soto has repackaged the discussion and, to some extent, contributed to widening its scope and reach.
What makes de Soto’s ideas so appealing is that, perhaps better than anyone else, he has been able to emphasize the economic dimension and implications of urban illegality. Most of the academic research, social mobilization and policy-making on the matter of informal settlements and land regularization have been supported by a combination of humanitarian, ethical, religious, sociopolitical and environmental arguments. de Soto’s approach, on the other hand, has stressed the significant impact that comprehensive regularization programs could have on the overall urban economy by linking the growing informal extralegal economy into the formal economy. Moreover, he has argued that such public policies can be instrumental in reducing social poverty.
In his view, small informal businesses and precarious shanty homes are essentially economic assets, “dead capital,” that should be revived by the official legal system and turned into liquid capital so people could gain access to formal credit, invest in their homes and businesses, and thus reinvigorate the economy as a whole. He has estimated the amount of dead capital in the developing world at about US$9.3 trillion, a staggering figure that has drawn the attention of many influential politicians, land developers, government officials and financial organizations (Bourbeau 2001). His argument has been summarized as follows:
“Most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism…But they hold these resources in defective forms…They lack the process to represent their property and create capital…They have houses, but not titles…. It is the representation of assets in legal property documents that gives them the power to create surplus value” (Mammen 2001).
In his first book, The Other Path, de Soto advocated the formalization of informal settlements. In his new book, The Mystery of Capital, he has taken this argument one step further, advocating that property ownership is the reason “why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else,” which is also the subtitle of the book. de Soto offers a three-part argument:
The recognition of property ownership in de Soto’s proposal is important because it would entail access to credit and finance. He argues that European countries and the U.S. improved their property systems, allowing economic actors to discover and realize the potential of their assets and thus to be in a position to produce the kind of noninflationary money necessary to finance and generate production. Following that logic, national and international organizations have proposed, and even imposed, the full legalization of businesses and the unqualified recognition of individual freehold titles for urban dwellers in some informal settlements as the “radical” way to transform decaying urban economies.
Critiques of de Soto’s Assumptions
Appealing as his ideas are, there are many flaws in de Soto’s arguments. Now that the dust raised by the initial media attention to his book has started to settle down, the debate has become increasingly critical. Such an appraisal is especially important because the regularization programs inspired by his ideas have had a significant impact on the daily lives of millions of people.
To begin with, there has been increasing criticism of de Soto’s methodological approach that led to the highly unlikely estimated figure of existing dead capital. Some analysts have pointed out that his grasp of the role and social construction of individual property ownership in European and U.S. economic history is not entirely correct (Payne 2001). Others have criticized de Soto for oversimplifying, if not totally misunderstanding, the complex dynamics of both informal and formal urban land markets (Bourbeau 2001). I have stressed the specific, perhaps unique, role of land ownership in developing countries, especially in Latin America, where historically the combination of weak capital markets, highly inflationary economies and deficient social security systems has turned land value appreciation into a fundamental capitalization mechanism, thus generating a culture of speculation that has long supported a heritage of patrimonialism and political clientilism. This process has, in its turn, deeply affected the conditions of access to urban land and housing and the spatial distribution of public equipment and services, as well as generating urban illegality.
Another related critical argument is that de Soto has failed to recognize that the poor, despite their poverty, have already amassed assets through access to credit, albeit not from formal institutions. In fact, de Soto has failed to provide evidence that banks and other official financial and credit institutions would be prepared to give systematic credit to the poor, even though there is historical evidence to the contrary. For example, in de Soto’s country of Peru very few people have been able to access official credit following a massive regularization program (Riofrio 1998; Calderon 2001). Moreover, existing research in Colombia and other Latin American countries has indicated that the poor would not even be interested or willing to obtain official credit, given the socioeconomic and fiscal implications of this process (Gilbert 2001). Recent studies also have questioned the urban and socioeconomic sustainability of settlements in Mexico, Peru, El Salvador and elsewhere that have been legalized by programs inspired by de Soto’s ideas (Duhau 2001; Kagawa 2001; Zeledon 2001). Such programs have focused exclusively, and artificially, on the formal legalization of informal settlements and have not included adequate upgrading and other socioeconomic programs, thus failing to promote any sociospatial integration.
From my perspective as a legal scholar, I see three main flaws in de Soto’s argument. First, while discussing the importance of legalizing informal settlements, he has failed to question the very nature of the legal system that has generated urban illegality in the first place. I believe that the discussion of laws and legal institutions has to be supported by a critical understanding of the nature of the law-making process, the conditions for law enforcement, and the dynamics of the process of social construction of urban illegality. In particular, I have argued that the legal treatment of property rights should be taken out of the narrow, individualistic context of civil law so the matter can be interpreted from the socially oriented criteria of redefined public urban law (Fernandes 2001).
In this context, far from being radical, de Soto’s argument is a very conservative one. His work has failed to qualify the discussion on property rights, and he seems to assume that there is a universal, a-historical, “natural” legal definition of such rights. However, in Latin American countries and elsewhere in the developing world, the state has treated differently the different forms of property rights (financial, industrial, intellectual, etc.) and the social relations around them, allowing for varying degrees of state intervention in the domain of economic property relations. It is only for a very specific form of property rights, land and real estate, that the state has failed to affirm the notion of the social function of property versus the dominant individualistic approach given to such rights by anachronistic civil legislation (Fernandes 1999). The historical and political factors that have allowed classical legal liberalism to survive in Latin America have to be addressed before any comprehensive legal reform, such as that proposed by de Soto, can be implemented. The intimate though dialectically contradictory relationship between legality and illegality cannot be ignored (Fernandes and Varley 1998). Such a critical approach to law would certainly serve to dismiss de Soto’s claim that formal, unqualified individual ownership can be used against crime and terrorism.
A second flaw is that research in many developing countries has indicated that, given a combination of certain social, political and institutional conditions, residents in informal settlements can share an effective perception of security of tenure, have access to informal (and sometimes formal) credit and public services, and invest in housing improvement, even without having legal titles (Payne et al. forthcoming).
Third, and more important, existing research has shown that while the recognition of individual freehold titles can promote individual security of legal tenure it does not necessarily entail sociospatial integration. Unless titling is undertaken within the context of a broader set of public policies that address urban, politico-institutional and socioeconomic conditions, legalization programs may actually aggravate the processes of exclusion and segregation. As a result, the original beneficiaries of the programs might not be able to remain on the legalized land, although that should be the ultimate objective of regularization programs, especially on public land.
Moreover, regularization programs have had little impact on social poverty, in part because the traditional banking and financial mechanisms have not embraced them, as de Soto has claimed. The root of the problem runs deeper because regularization programs have a remedial nature. They can only have a more direct impact on urban poverty if they are part of a broader set of preventive public policies aimed at promoting overall urban reform and supported by socioeconomic policies aimed at generating job opportunities and income. There is a fundamental role for the market economy in this process, but it also requires systematic intergovernmental relations, public-private partnerships, and above all renewed social mobilization. Furthermore, de Soto has failed to consider the essential gender and environmental implications of land legalization.
To prevent the production of these perverse effects, we must identify and understand the factors that have contributed to the phenomenon of urban illegality. These include not only the combination of land markets and political systems but also the elitist and exclusionary legal systems still prevailing in Latin America. To legalize the illegal requires the introduction of innovative legal-political strategies to promote the articulation of individual land tenure with the recognition of social housing rights compatible with keeping dwellers in their existing settlements. Housing rights cannot be reduced to individual property rights.
New tenure policies need to integrate four main factors: legal instruments that create effective rights; socially oriented urban planning laws; political-institutional agencies and mechanisms for democratic urban management; and inclusionary macro-socioeconomic policies. The search for innovative legal-political solutions also includes the incorporation of a long-neglected gender dimension and a clear attempt to minimize the impacts such policies have on the land market. The benefits of public investment should be captured by the urban poor, not by traditional and new private land developers, as has happened frequently in settlements regularized according to de Soto’s proposals.
In conclusion, I would argue that regularization programs should be group specific, taking into account the local historical, cultural and political contexts as well as the existing forms of tenure arrangements, both legal and customary and formal and informal. Public administrators and lawmakers should refuse the pressure to homogenize land and property laws. Individual property ownership will always be an attractive option that should be considered, but there are many other legal-political alternatives.
Hernando de Soto is absolutely right when he questions the legitimacy of exclusionary legal systems. However, while he has uncritically assumed that legitimacy would result from the widespread recognition of individual ownership, other research has proved that this is not necessarily the case. He is generally right when he says that lawyers lack an understanding of the economic process. However, many observers believe that his own understanding of the economic process may be deeply flawed, and that he could also learn a thing or two about the legal process.
Edesio Fernandes is an attorney, urban planner and lecturer in the Development Planning Unit of University College London. He is also coordinator of IRGLUS-International Research Group on Law and Urban Space. This article is based in part on his ongoing research and a lecture he presented at the Lincoln Institute in October 2001.
References
Bourbeau, Heather. 2001. Property wrongs: How weak ideas gain strong appeal in the world of development economics. Foreign Policy (November/December):78-79.
Calderon Cockburn, Julio A. 2001. Comparative analysis of the benefited and non-benefited population by the national formalization plan, in Has the well-being of the population improved?: A balance of the main social policies and programs. Lima: National Institute of Statistics and Information (INEI): 65-92.
Duhau, Emilio. 2001. Impacts of regularization programs: Notes on the Mexican experience. Paper presented at the Lincoln Institute workshop on Informal Land Markets: Land Tenure Regularization and Urban Upgrading Programs (October).
de Soto, Hernando. 1986. The Other Path. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
_____. 2001. The Mystery of Capital. London: Bantam Press.
Fernandes, Edesio. 1999. Redefining property rights in the age of liberalization and privatization. Land Lines (November) 11(6):4-5.
_____. 2001. Law and the production of urban illegality. Land Lines (May) 13 (3):1-4.
Fernandes, Edesio and Ann Varley, eds. 1998. Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries. London: Zed.
Gilbert, Alan. 2001. On the mystery of capital and the myths of Hernando de Soto: What difference does legal title make? Paper presented at the N-AERUS Workshop in Leuven, Belgium (June).
Kagawa, Ayako. 2001. Policy effects and tenure security perceptions of Peruvian urban land tenure regularization policy in the 1990s. Paper presented at the N-AERUS Workshop in Leuven, Belgium (June).
Mammen, David. 2001. Roundtable discussion for the International Division of the American Planning Association. Interplan (June):2-9.
Payne, Geoffrey. 2001. The mystery of capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else. Habitat Debate (September) 7 (3):23.
Payne, Geoffrey, et al. Forthcoming 2002. Land, Rights and Innovations: Secure Land for the Urban Poor. London: International Technology Development Group (ITDG).
Riofrio, Gustavo. 1998. Why have families mortgaged so little? Paper presented at the Lincoln Institute workshop on Comparative Policy Perspectives on Urban Land Market Reform in Latin America, Southern Africa and Eastern Europe (July).
Zeledon, Aida. 2001. De facto and legal regularization programs in El Salvador. Paper presented at the Lincoln Institute workshop on Informal Land Markets: Land Tenure Regularization and Urban Upgrading Programs (October).
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In the United States we are used to thinking about the university within the context of its host city. The University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the University of Illinois in Urbana play major roles in driving the economies of those traditional college towns. Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are examples of research universities that have served as incubators for new industries that have had significant economic and industrial impacts in Silicon Valley, California, and metropolitan Boston. The Julliard School in New York City, the Chicago Art Institute, and the film departments at the University of California (UCLA) and University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles also have had a significant effect on their local cultural landscapes.
After more than five years of focusing on the real estate development activities of U.S. colleges and universities, Lincoln Institute researchers are now investigating the roles that universities play in their host cities around the world. Will the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a 733-hectare campus in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, be able to maintain autonomy from the federal government through its land policies? Can a university that serves Northern Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants succeed in building a new campus in an area known for poverty and intractable political violence? What lessons can we learn from the redevelopment of a German military barracks by the University of Lueneburg that might be applicable to other universities’ development efforts?
Universities are major players in many activities not traditionally associated with the ivory tower. They are employers, purchasers, engines of economic growth, innovators, cultural meccas, branders of place and, increasingly, major real estate developers. This last role creates a web of opportunities and challenges that are not only important to the future of universities but also extend throughout the politics and economics of cities.
Formal examinations of the university’s role in acquiring, managing, selling and developing real estate have not been a topic of academic and professional inquiry in the U.S. until recently, but these issues are even less frequently discussed in international circles. There are few comprehensive case studies and literally no multi-continent examinations of how urban universities operate in real estate and land development, even though there is widespread agreement over its growing importance. The contributions of universities to their cities, the nature of state higher education policy and the increasing role of private market actors in university expansion are all important features of urban land development today, although they are realized differently in various places.
To facilitate further exploration and comparison of these issues, a dozen international scholars from Europe, South America, Asia and Africa gathered at the Lincoln Institute in March 2004 to present papers and engage in a critique of their work. They quickly moved the discussion beyond the case studies into a broader conversation about the role of the university in the history and the future of national policy toward cities and how such policy is affecting and is affected by the global economy.
The Role of the State
Outside the U.S., the university is almost always a public institution; therefore university land development is closely intertwined with and often an integral part of local and/or national planning and development policies. The levels of autonomy in real estate development decision making experienced by international universities are also dramatically different from those of U.S. universities, because of their relative attachment to the state as both an agency and public institution.
Anne Haila of the University of Helsinki pointed out the strong history of planning in Finland, for example, where plans are laws that carry great weight and supply clear direction to university land use planning. All university real estate in Finland is owned and managed by the national real estate company, which strives for efficiency in all of its real estate strategies. Conflicts between universities and the property manager became especially prevalent after 1999, when university departments were ordered to pay the full price of rent for their premises; if departments increased their space they had to pay more, but if they decreased it they were compensated. The reasoning behind the policy was to abolish the idea of “free space” and to make university departments aware that bringing in new research and other revenue-generating projects would help them pay for additional space.
Carlos Morales-Schechinger presented another example of the relationship between university land policies and the state in his review of UNAM in Mexico City. UNAM has been autonomous from the federal government for more than 50 years and has “abandoned any intention of becoming a developer.” Instead, UNAM considers the land’s use value as a sanctuary, an area secure from government intervention, and a place for study, natural spaces and public art. Approximately 29 percent (212 ha) of the land has been declared an ecological zone due to its unique flora and fauna.
Morales-Schechinger suggests that UNAM’s reluctance to engage in current real estate development is related to its past history, when some of its land was acquired from the territory granted to the peasants after the 1910 Revolution. The university serves nearly 260,000 students from all socioeconomic groups and thus views itself as an independent and often vocal critic of the federal government.
Shifting City Growth Patterns
Changes in the nature and structure of the nation-state brought on by economic restructuring, new political alliances, changing demographics, and the decentralization of governmental responsibilities and mandates can bring about radical changes in the real estate development policies of universities. Three participants focusing on universities in Portugal, Germany and Finland described the conditions of student demand and changes in the technology of work that were forcing both expansions and relocations of universities (or parts of them) in an increasingly decentralized urban environment.
Isabel Breda-Vazquez, speaking about the University of Porto (UP), noted the demographic shift in the city center, where UP was originally located, when it decided to expand and relocate its engineering and science facilities outside of the city, due to increasing demand for those courses of study and changing employment patterns. Problems associated with the subsequent decline of the city center included physical degradation, social vulnerability problems, functional obsolescence of buildings and spaces, reduced economic activity and consumption, and relocated student housing.
Changes in political alliances and the fall of the Iron Curtain reduced Germany’s need for military barracks, according to Katrin Anacker, and this has resulted in the large-scale conversion of one such facility to university property in Lueneberg. Increased student enrollment, a shortage of classrooms and the fact that university buildings were scattered throughout the city were important factors in the University of Lueneburg’s decision to take advantage of the military’s abandonment of a nearby barracks. Although dealing specifically with the conversion of military property into university buildings, Anacker’s paper may be read for its insights into the reuse of other types of obsolete or abandoned industrial buildings.
The growth demands on public universities and the decentralization of governance are occurring in the face of competing issues of demographic shift out of the city and revitalization efforts focusing on older parts of cities. Many workshop attendees identified the theme of abandonment during these discussions, in the contexts of either the state or local government or the university abandoning the city. Universities almost everywhere are placed in critical positions as they actively develop land themselves, and thus can be seen as agents of urban change—to both the benefit and the detriment of the city.
David Perry argued that to discuss the university as an engine of growth may be only part of the picture. The modern university may be an engine of the city’s development by dint of attrition, becoming even more important to central city renewal by filling the vacuum created by the withdrawal of once dominant agents in both the public and private sectors.
University Development Zones
Several papers addressed universities that are their own “zones of development” or “cities unto themselves.” Abner Colmenares presented the case of the Central University of Venezuela, a public institution in Caracas, and its Rental Zone (Zona Rental) Plaza Venezuela project dating from the 1940s. The notion of the Zona Rental dates back to 1827, when Venezuelan President Simon Bolivar granted real estate properties and farms to the university, to support its faculty and provide for its upkeep.
Adopting as its model Columbia University’s approach to the development of Rockefeller Center in New York City, Central University created and transferred the land to an independent foundation (Andrés Bello Fund Foundation for Scientific Development of the Central University of Venezuela–FFABUCV), which was mandated to promote scientific research by generating financial resources through the development of rental zone properties. By late 2004, more than 40 million square feet of construction had been completed, creating public spaces for the city, a subway center and numerous rental income sites, including a mall.
Wilmar Salim presented a similarly expansive project, the relocation of four universities in Indonesia to rural land formerly occupied by a rubber plantation. The government’s decision to relocate the universities from the capital city of Bandung to the Jatinangor area 23 kilometers distant resulted in the development of a new town to service the large campus. While the planning for the university was carefully conceived, such was not the case for the town that grew up alongside it. Salim notes several serious problems resulting from this relocation: environmental deterioration of the rural area due to the increased population and construction; lack of adequate planning in terms of infrastructure; and negative effects on community institutions caused by the influx of a population much larger than and culturally different from the indigenous residents.
Contested Space
The topic of the university as a contested space was addressed by Haim Yacobi of Israel and Frank Gaffikin of Northern Ireland, both of whom spoke of the challenges for urban universities located in places of conflict. In the Northern Ireland case, an attempt was made to set up a branch of the University of Ulster in an embattled area of Protestant-Catholic conflict and economic deprivation in Belfast. Although U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were present at the groundbreaking, the project faltered due to the lengthy development time and turnover of leadership, coupled with the existing problems associated with a historically contested space. The result was a distinct loss of credibility for the university in the community. Gaffikin stressed that when universities enter into these kinds of situations, they have to see the projects through with strong civic leadership.
Yacobi discussed the siting of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, a decision made by the government rather than the university, as was the case in Belfast. According to Yacobi, relocating the university after the 1967 war had a fundamental role in judaizing Jerusalem.
Fabio Todeschini of South Africa also examined the roles and responsibilities of the university in shaping urban space in a place that was already contested. He noted that the University of Cape Town has undergone enormous change since the apartheid era; currently more than one-half of the student population is black, although the majority of professors are white. The development and real estate practices of these and other universities have both created and been affected by significant symbolic, economic and cultural changes in their countries.
The workshop participants agreed about the seeming contradiction between the importance of universities to their cities and political economies and the lack of formal study of this phenomenon. The meeting confirmed that, both locally and globally, universities have enduring, indeed even increasing, levels of importance in their cities and regions. It is also clear that land development policies are equally important to the universities, to the development futures of cities and to the policy relationship with the private market.
Barbara Sherry is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Urban Planning, a research assistant at its Great Cities Institute (GCI), and an attorney.
The City and the University Project
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched The City and the University Project five years ago, to study the changing relationships between universities and their immediate neighborhoods, cities and the society at large. The Lincoln Institute shares this interest in the role that universities play in their cities with many other organizations. However, our attempt to understand this role is motivated by questions regarding urban assets and the use of those assets.
According to the currently dominant paradigm of enlightened self-interest, universities engage the city with the realization that the economic well-being of the abutting community is directly correlated to its own health. Through this project we are attempting to articulate a philosophy that universities should serve society as a whole, not just their abutters. Our goal is to extend the thinking, conversation and actions of university-community-city relations beyond this paradigm.
Under the leadership of Rosalind Greenstein of the Lincoln Institute, David Perry of the Great Cities Institute (GCI) of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Wim Wiewel of the University of Baltimore, key actors from every conceivable side of university real estate development practices (including university administrators and faculty, developers, city planners and managers, journalists, nonprofit groups, and members of federal and state agencies) have been invited to participate in workshops sponsored by the Lincoln Institute. Perry and Wiewel have edited a book of U.S. and Canadian case studies contributed by some of these participants. Titled The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis, this book is being published this spring by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., in association with the Lincoln Institute.
As a natural outgrowth of their work in North America, Perry, Wiewel and Greenstein expanded their research collaboration with an international seminar built on case studies from several continents. The workshop in March 2004 generated papers that will become part of a new edited volume, tentatively titled The University, the City and the State: Comparative Studies of University Real Estate Development.
In 2005 the Institute will convene a roundtable of practitioners and scholars to examine the university-city relationship in a variety of dimensions, including political, historical and philosophical. Another course is intended for neighborhood groups located near universities that face impressive challenges because of the particular role universities play in their district and their city. The course offers such groups the opportunity to learn how to best use their resources, relative to their university neighbors, to improve their urban environment.
The Institute will also offer a professional training opportunity for private-sector developers who work with and for universities that are extending their boundaries as demand increases for new laboratories, residential spaces, athletic facilities and other amenities. In addition, we are developing a special Web site for the urban university project that will facilitate communication among and between practitioners, policy makers and scholars.
