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■ 185 Conclusion The principal quality we imagine is urbanity: a place that promotes interaction, among communities of the university, neighborhood and city. In future years, the major advances and breakthroughs in higher education and research will likely occur in the intersection of disciplines, of ways of thinking. Achieving positive relationships with communities also requires understanding the intersections of their goals and the opportunities to meet them. Marilyn Jordan Taylor,“Crossing beyond the Boundaries: Columbia University in West Harlem,”2000 M arilyn Jordan Taylor’s description of the design for Columbia University ’s new Manhattanville campus could equally describe the qualities of urban space and interaction occurring today in Chicago’s South Loop: the interpenetration of campus and city not only enabled by chance location but purposely created and promoted through design.1 The narrative of the case study of Chicago that forms the core of this book, the story of how its universities have contributed to the production of new urban organizations and ideas and how the city has informed the creation of new campus spaces and forms, is situated within larger national trends as universities expand both their missions and their campuses to meet the needs of twenty-first-century higher education. Here I would like to briefly describe some of these trends and speculate on what the Chicago case may teach us as we move toward campuses conceived around ideas of “urbanity,” where campus and city interact across fluid boundaries. Repairing the Wounds of Urban Renewal How are today’s universities engaged in the production of knowledge around cities and their communities? More and more universities invoke the city or urban life as part of their mission statements; the directive to engage the city sounds simple but can lead to situations that are at once extremely nuanced, highly volatile, and potentially long-lasting in effect. What do universities 186 ■ Conclusion get in return for their efforts? As Ira Harkavy, founding director of the Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, stated, “Universities that are seen as problem solvers will be the great universities of the next century.”2 Today’s urban universities, Harkavy and his collaborator John L. Pucket claimed, should reunite the two great models of the latenineteenth -century Progressive movement: the foundation of the urban research university and the work of the social settlements. They argued that the split in these institutions’ missions, techniques, and reward systems led to a loss of the potential for truly progressive educational institutions where research, teaching, and public service would be seen comprehensively, and whose mission would be directed toward “societal transformations,” particularly those taking place in cities. They did not deny that a university’s role in community service might be self-serving, but academically based community service, they argued, returns to the university in knowledge production.3 This “neo-progressive” approach is itself controversial. It both calls for the university to be a “moral institution” and, in teaching and compelling civic engagement and responsibility, returns higher education to the nineteenth-century model of nation building.4 It also goes against the grain of the structure of contemporary higher education and the notion that the production of knowledge should be a discrete pursuit, unencumbered by social, political, cultural, or economic forces. The reform agenda of Hull-House, according to Harkavy and Pucket, accomplished a balance between an internal community and a larger urban community by applying research to address the problems of urban life through both educational programs and studies of the urban environment. I would argue, too, that the spatial organization of the settlement as an institution embedded into the physical fabric and social life of its neighborhood was key to this engagement. The techniques of community building used by Hull-House residents, including the crossing of boundaries between urban living, research, and education, was expressed in architecture in a way that was distinct from the model of urban university campuses being developed almost simultaneously. The exclusionary nature of the university campus compound reinforced the increasing isolation of scientifically defined research from the activist agenda of the reform movement, even as the university built powerful frameworks for understanding and commenting on urban transformation. Althoughthenineteenth-centurycityisaninappropriatedesignmodelfor the twenty-first-century city and the social settlement is a programmatically [3.91.106.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:02 GMT) Conclusion ■ 187 inadequate model for contemporary urban engagement and reform, universities are increasingly active in their neighboring communities in ways purposely designed to repair the wounds of...