University City

Laura Wolf-Powers is Professor of Urban Policy & Planning, City University of New York Hunter College.

"University City is a significant addition to scholarship concerning innovation districts, megaprojects, citizen participation, and the role of universities in urban redevelopment...and offers an excellent foundation for future comparative research." (Journal of Urban Affairs) "The book's appeal and approach are interdisciplinary: it speaks to urban planning, uses historical and ethnographic research and engages with topics like power, stigma and local political processes that are relevant to political science, sociology and geography...[Wolf-Powers] challenges universities to attend to the historical events that have shaped their surroundings, where wealth, income, access to education and power are unequally distributed." (Urban Studies) "A powerful interrogation of the 'innovation district' as the dominant urban planning model in today's knowledge economy. Laura Wolf-Powers takes us back to the origins of innovation in West Philadelphia but brilliantly draws our attention to the nonfinancial visions of development created by local residents that have been lost to the planning focus on real estate values. By tracking the enduring harms of past development decisions, University City makes a compelling case for placing reparations at the center of urban planning." (Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower) "A long overdue critical look at university-driven urban development in a contemporary knowledge and innovation economy. Laura Wolf-Powers masterfully situates the rise of innovation districts as an outgrowth of the failures of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal policies and practices, specifically. She demonstrates how the emergence of coalitions of public-private interests pursue innovation-driven development, often in tension with legacy communities and predictably at the expense of more equitable and inclusive urban revitalization. This book will be an essential read for scholars who want to understand the changing dynamics of urban growth coalitions." (Sheila Foster, Georgetown University) "Laura Wolf-Powers offers a powerful, forthright accounting of what is owed to urban communities sacrificed for 'innovation district' redevelopment-in the twenty-first century as much as the 1950s-60s. Her telling of the story from the community's perspective is masterful, rooted in rigorous archival research, economic analysis, and direct observation. She delivers profound insights about what residents value, and how universities' unquestioning pursuit of 'innovation' created precarity among their neighbors. University City will enable clearer, more grounded, more searching understandings for all of us implicated in these contests." (Randall F. Mason, University of Pennsylvania)