The University & Urban Revival

Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets

By Judith Rodin

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, 232 pp., $34.95 hardcover.

At the end of the 1960s, when crime and racial animosity were running high in Philadelphia and other cities, a college friend invited me to visit him at the University of Pennsylvania, but warned me that parts of the neighborhood west of Penn were unsafe. Students who lived a few blocks too far from the campus in West Philadelphia were getting mugged or knifed on the way to their apartments.

University policy, articulated as early as 1948, had been to orient the campus inward, away from the public streets, away from the neighborhood’s festering problems. Eventually that strategy failed — at Penn and other urban universities — because it allowed danger and decrepitude to creep right up to the school gates. It fell to Judith Rodin, a native Philadelphian, to lead a turnaround — which she did with great aplomb as Penn’s president from 1994 to 2004. Today, if you walk the district known as University City, you’ll find a flourishing retail corridor on Walnut Street, the main thoroughfare bordering the core of the campus. University buildings that had unfriendly backs along Walnut Street have been replaced or altered, helping to enliven the atmosphere.

“We saw that we could promote connectivity with the community and the city by taking walls and fences down and emphasizing visual transparency of buildings and accessibility to open spaces,” Rodin writes in The University & Urban Revival. “While we were renovating buildings we gave them new public entrances from the street side of campus as well as from internal courtyards. We re-clad buildings that had stern brick walls,” making them more visually open. In an area near the Schuylkill River, where the university’s future expansion will be concentrated, “New streets and a grand boulevard are being constructed,” Rodin notes. Because of these and other initiatives, Penn looks much more inviting than it used to.

Rodin, now president of the Rockefeller Foundation, gives a straightforward, detailed account of how Penn has ameliorated neighborhood distress and made University City a place where people want to be — to socialize, shop, dine, see a movie, visit a first-rate bookstore, and generally enjoy city life. The “Penn model” of university and urban revitalization has won praise nationwide.

More than design needed
Urban design, no matter how skillful, cannot by itself turn things around in areas as troubled as West Philadelphia. Universities, which are often resented because of their insensitive past decisions, must work diligently at generating trust. At Penn, Rodin, while leading a patient, long-term strategy of reaching out to neighbors, property owners, local businesses, city agencies, and public schools, was careful not to overpromise or to say there would be an overnight transformation.

Friction frequently comes from universities’ having grown by intruding on adjacent residential areas. Under Rodin, Penn promised “never again to encroach on the neighborhoods to the west, despite the fact that land there would be less expensive to assemble.” Instead, the university pledged to expand in the opposite direction — eastward, into areas containing underused industrial and commercial buildings, parking lots, and other nonresidential structures.

Whether Penn is getting much new architecture of lasting quality isn’t clearly from the few photos included in this book. Rodin praises Boston architect Carlos Zapata for pressing the university to commission more “innovative, edgy architecture,” such as a supermarket with several floors of parking above, and a sleek, contemporary entertainment complex known as the Bridge. To my eye, the Bridge looks appealing, but the big, exposed garage, towering over the 45,000 sq. ft. grocery store, is ugly and at odds with an old classical façade next door. Rodin’s argument that edgy architecture is essential if the school wants to be innovative sounds to me like a silly modernist cliché — on the order of saying that you can’t do original thinking unless you dress in the latest fashion.

Only the final 10 pages of this book present explicit directions on how other universities should go about fostering urban revival. At first, this surprised me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the uniqueness of each university, city, and cast of characters makes universal prescriptions almost impossible. Fortunately, Rodin’s discussion lays out the Penn experience candidly and with a fitting level of detail, so readers will come away with an appreciation of planning and organizational approaches that can produce a robust university district. The appendix includes summaries on Penn’s major real estate projects. Weak only on architectural styling, The University & Urban Revival should be useful to urbanists and academics alike.