Transforming Cities and Minds through the Scholarship of Engagement: Economy, Equity, and Environment

Introduction

1 Introduction Lorlene Hoyt It’s obvious that the problems of urban life are enormously complex; there are no simple solutions. I’m almost embarrassed to mention it as a problem because it is so enormously complex, but we live in cities.They determine the future of this country. And I find it ironic that universities which focused with such energy on rural America a century ago have never focused with equal urgency on our cities. —Ernest L. Boyer (1996, 19) Converging Crises Cities In September 2008, the country was in economic free fall. Hundreds of banks, large and small, were failing, corporations were filing for bankruptcy , and the stock market plunged. Thousands of Americans lost their jobs and their pensions. Families lost their homes to foreclosure. But for cities from Camden, New Jersey, to Kansas City, Missouri, to Oakland, California, this Great Recession was only the latest chapter in a decades-long crisis. Such cities and their people, who worked in mills and factories to supply clothing, food, and luxuries to the world, have long been intimately familiar with the devastating consequences of urban decline. They watched their cities decay as mills and factories closed down or took their jobs to the South, where unions were few or nonexistent, and wages lower.They watched neighbors move away, housing deteriorate, downtown centers empty, crime increase, and debris fill alleyways. As the American economy soared in the 1990s, these small cities and portions of large cities were left behind and, in effect, forgotten (Hoyt and Leroux 2007). The idea of uniting city planning education and practice for the purpose of transforming cities and minds—reciprocal knowledge—is not my own (Hoyt 2010). It evolved in collaboration and over the course of 2 Transforming Cities and Minds through the Scholarship of Engagement a decade as I co-led MIT@Lawrence, a sustained city-campus partnership between M.I.T. and the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. A former textile-mill city located thirty miles from Cambridge on the banks of the Merrimack River, Lawrence was designed in 1845 as an efficient industrial machine. Like other forgotten cities, Lawrence has struggled with a legacy of deindustrialization and globalization—unemployment, racial and ethnic conflicts, environmental contamination, and a faltering civic infrastructure. But devoted civic leaders in Lawrence, like their counterparts in other small cities, have learned to cope with, and in many ways thrive in, a rapidly changing world. Today Lawrence boasts a growing population of Caribbean and Central American immigrants and is the most heavily Latino city in New England. The ethnic conflicts between Latinos and Anglos in the 1980s and 1990s have been replaced by dynamic partnerships among rooted institutions. Tied to, dependent on, and embedded in neighborhoods , universities and colleges, hospitals, churches, community development corporations, and community foundations are helping to bring cities like Lawrence back to hope and to productive life. Together, civic leaders and residents are learning the norms and advancing the values of democracy by replacing long-standing habits of distrust with new ideas and relationships. Collective action among these and other rooted institutions is resulting in large-scale iconic projects like Union Crossing and the Spicket River Greenway, which exhibit new ways of linking and thinking about issues of economy, equity, and environment. The knowledge necessary for transforming cities is, in large part, born and developed in neighborhoods, not universities; it is cultivated by civic leaders and residents, day by day, through seemingly insignificant interactions that culminate in tangible outcomes.The guiding principles of democratic engagement are created, tested, and recalibrated locally in response to ever-changing conditions. As more Americans come faceto -face with the same crises and struggles people in cities are beginning to overcome, the need becomes increasingly urgent to synthesize and disseminate local knowledge to society at large. City-campus partnerships expose faculty, staff, and students to relevant and pressing issues while giving them an opportunity to witness and acquire the skills needed to solve them. Cities can benefit from the new ideas and added skills that people inside the university bring to the challenges at hand as well as their motivation to publish and share what they have learned far and wide (Reardon 2000). Introduction 3 Universities and Colleges It seems to me that for the first time in nearly half a century, institutions of higher learning are not collectively caught up in some urgent national endeavor. Still, our outstanding universities...